Our Researchers
Prof. Natalie Edwards FAHA SFHEA
Natalie Edwards is Adjunct Professor at The University of Adelaide and Professor of Literature in French and Head of the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol. She completed her BA(Hons) in the UK (University of Bath) and her PhD in the US (Northwestern University). Her research investigates literary writing by minority authors: migrant authors, exiled writers, refugee writers and women writers, for example. She focuses on contemporary authors who write in French – not just from France but also those who write in French from other parts of the Francophone world. She is interested in how minority writers use literature as a means to represent their experience and how they innovate literary genres, paradigms and canons as they do so.
She has written three sole-authored books on this literature: Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Francophone Women’s Autobiography (2011), Voicing Voluntary Childlessness: Narratives of Non-Mothering (2016) and Multilingual Life Writing by Francophone Women: Translingual Selves (2020). She has also published numerous edited volumes in the UK, US and Australia.
Dr. Christopher Hogarth
Dr. Christopher Hogarth is Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies and French at the University of South Australia, based in Adelaide. He completed his BA (Hons) in the UK (University of Bath) and his PhD in the US (Northwestern University). He has worked in Australia since 2012. He has published especially on the intersection of literature from France, Italy and Senegal, with a focus on migrant writing and transdiasporic identity. While Senegalese literature about migration has long been the focus of his study, he also writes about the notion of “Afropean” culture in French, Italian and English, as well as the intersection of literature with other forms of media, such as film and music. As someone living a life of transcontinental métissage he is delighted to be a Chief Investigator on this project to chart a transcontinental literary history.
Dr. Shannon Sandford
Dr. Shannon Sandford is a Lecturer in Literary Studies at Griffith University, Queensland. She completed her BA (Hons) and her PhD at Flinders University, South Australia. Her research interests surround self-representation, embodiment, and marginalised lives in comics, graphic narratives, and digital media and culture. She focuses on the ways that visual and textual narratives are used for acts of personal disclosure that seek to represent and make sense of difficult experiences such as trauma, illness, violence, and displacement. She has published especially on graphic life narratives produced by women, queer and non-binary people, migrants, and refugees.