Dr Emma Wagstaff MA, MPhil, PhD

I have taught at the University of Birmingham since 2006, contributing to core courses at all levels and offering specialist teaching on French poetry, experimental writing and the visual arts. I am currently Director of Undergraduate Studies in Modern Languages.

Previously I held temporary teaching posts at Trinity College, Cambridge and at the université Paris XII at Créteil. I was Research Fellow at St John's College, Cambridge from 2002-2005, having completed my PhD in French and undergraduate degree in French and German at Trinity College.  

I teach on a range of courses in French Studies, with a particular focus on translation, modern experimental texts and visual art.

As tutor and convenor on core modules in the Birmingham Languages Graduate curriculum, I especially enjoy discussing aspects of French and Francophone cultures with students in the target language as well as working through challenging grammar points or translation problems.

I currently co-supervise doctoral researchers working on early modern, modern and contemporary French writing, connections between literature and visual art, and Caribbean and African literature. I would be very glad to hear from students wishing to pursue Masters or doctoral research in the following areas:

modern and contemporary poetry
poetry and translation
comparative topics in modern literature
poetic form and political engagement
French writers and art
word-image interactions.

I have also supervised projects and dissertations by students taking the MA in Translation Studies, and have acted as internal and external examiner for PhD and MA dissertations.

Find out more - our PhD French Studies  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

I investigate poetic form from the following perspectives: the effect of form on the writing and reading process, with a particular focus on attention; the relationship between contemporary French poetic practice and other arts and disciplines, including poetry in translation; and the connection between the form of creative works and cultures of protest.

My most recent single-authored book is the first in English to investigate major twentieth-century French poet André du Bouchet, and examines attentiveness in his poetic and critical work: André du Bouchet: Poetic Forms of Attention (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

From 2017-2020, I led a British Academy/Leverhulme-funded series of activities on responses to the protest and events of the 1968 period in cultural reviews and magazines in different parts of the world, which will result in a comparative special journal issue. The project website is here: https://1968inreviews.wordpress.com/home/ and the digital exhibition of reviews here: https://protestinprint.co.uk/.

Together with Professor Nina Parish (University of Stirling), I directed an AHRC network on Contemporary French Poetic practice (2012-2015) which led to a number of co-authored and co-edited publications, including Writing the Real: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary French Poetry (London: Enitharmon, 2016). Of those intermedial connections, my particular interest lies in the ways in which writers reflect on visual art, and I published the single-authored book Writing Art: French Literary Responses to the Work of Alberto Giacometti (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011). 

I regularly speak at the Society for French Studies annual conference and other conferences, and review articles and manuscripts for journals and publishers including The Modern Language review, Nottingham French Studies Palgrave, and Oxford University Press.

My work on poetry translation has led to invitations to contribute to translation workshops at various venues in the UK and France, and I wrote entries for the catalogue accompanying the Giacometti retrospective at Tate Modern in 2017.

I am a poetry editor for the Peter Lang book series ‘Modern French Identities’

I have held a number of roles at the University of Birmingham including Deputy Head of Education for the School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music, Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Modern Languages, Programme Lead for French, and Tutor for Erasmus Exchange students.