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Dr Jessica Stacey

College Career Development Fellow in French

Introduction

I attended my local comprehensive school in North East Derbyshire, and in 2005 went to King’s College London to study French and Philosophy. I remained in the KCL French Department for my MA and PhD, with a year in between at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon. After two years working in a support role at the Service User Research Enterprise (part of the Institute of Psychiatry), I took up my position at Queen’s in 2017. My work focuses on eighteenth-century conceptions of Time and Civilisation, with a particular interest in how writers accounted for (and instrumentalised representations of) catastrophes. I teach French Literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as translation into English. 

Teaching

I teach early modern French literature (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) to second and fourth year students at Queen’s, as well as translation into English for all year groups, and the first year literature courses.

Research

My research focuses on narratives of catastrophe in eighteenth-century France, and in particular on how such narratives contributed to forming ideas of the modern and pre- or anti-modern. My interest in all things catastrophic has grown from a fascination with rhetoric and storytelling around climate change, and with how societies have approached responsibility and agency in the face of world altering events, from the Middle Ages to the present.

Publications

'Two views of an inevitable catastrophe that did not take place: Werner Herzog and Daniel Maximin on Guadeloupe, 1976', Journal for Postcolonial Writing 55.5 (2019), 670-684, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2019.1642235. 

English Legend in French Romance: Perkin Warbeck in the work of Horace Walpole and Baculard d’Arnaud, Compar(a)isons (31) 2009 [2015], 7-26

‘Doing Time’: Bastille Martyrs, Modern Saints, Matters of Time: Material Temporalities in Twentieth-Century French Culture, ed. by Lisa Jeschke and Adrian May (Series: Modern French Identities - Volume 115), 147-162