MPhil and PhD research

The results of the Research Assessment Exercise for 2008 show that for the proportion of research publications judged world-leading in terms of originality, significance and rigour, the French Department at the University of Sheffield is second only to Oxford. For all its research activity, including the research environment, research teams (staff and postgraduate research students) and the esteem in which our researchers are held in the broader community, the Department received the second-highest score for world-leading quality in the entire UK. The Department emerged from the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise in seventh place overall of the league table ranking research activity in French throughout universities in Great Britain.

We are also in the front rank of research activity as measured by the award of substantial grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and other external funding bodies. We have particular expertise in editing and the production of electronic resources, in collaboration with the Humanities Research Institute.

Academic staff in the Department have supervised MPhil/PhD theses on topics ranging from medieval narrative to contemporary film studies. :

• The French Filmic Response to Homosexuality during the 1980s and 1990s
• War crimes trials in Post-war France
• Recent Russian Writers Writing in French
• The Figure, Space and Movement in the Works of Valérie Jouve and Jean Echenoz
• Representations of Gender in French Advertising
• An Irigarayan Reading of Korean Women’s Writing
• Le dandysme littéraire de Barbey d’Aurevilly
• Sententiousness in André Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs
• A study of Condorcet’s Eloges
• The portrayal of war and combat in Old French literature (1150-1270)
• Business sponsorship of the arts in France
• An Edition and Study of Besancon Municipal Library ms 864 (Jean Froissart's Chroniques, Book I, 'A' redaction
• The significance of work in the writing of Jean Giono (1929-1945)
• Ornithology in Seventeenth-Century France: J.B. Faultrier's Traitté Général des Oyseaux (cross-disciplinary PhD with the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences)

Current thesis topics include

• Approaches to Guillaume de Palerne
• Translating the Past: The Works of Geimar, Wace and Jordan Fantosme
• Comic (Re)Writing: A Study of Hue De Rotelande's Ipomedon
• Symbolism and sources in the Old French Partonopeu de Blois
• Child poverty in working families: a Franco-British comparison
• Identities and the year-abroad experience
• Contemporary Visual Arts in Algeria
• Investigating subtitling strategies for the translation of wordplay in Wallace and Gromit

Current doctoral student profiles

For further information on the research interests of staff and possible projects you could undertake please contact Dr Wendy Michallat in the first instance.