Introduction
Having grown up in the Paris region, I went through the French school system and obtained a baccalauréat littéraire before coming to the UK in 2015 to study French and Beginners’ Russian at Pembroke College, Oxford. After my undergraduate studies, I spent two years in Paris studying for a Masters in Comparative Literature at Sorbonne Université, before returning to Oxford in 2022 to complete a DPhil under the supervision of Prof. Seth Whidden. Over the course of my doctoral studies and prior to joining Queen’s, I taught French language and literature at several colleges as well as for the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages.
Teaching
At Queen’s, I teach second-year unseen translation from French to English (Paper IIA).
Research
My ongoing DPhil research looks at the works of lesbian French poet Renée Vivien (1877-1909), focusing on the ways in which occult and folkloric motifs enable her to formulate an early queer sense of poetic self that challenges the dominant 19th-century discourse on gender, sexuality, and national identity. I am more broadly interested in the literary and cultural construction of queerness in France and Britain in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
Publications
An up-to-date list of my publications can be found here: https://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/people/rebecca-boyd