Katie Pleming
Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies

- French and Francophone Studies
- Department of European Languages and Cultures
- School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Contact details
- Tel: 01316 508411
- Email: katie.pleming@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Room 3.05
50 George Square - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9LH
Background
Dr Katie Pleming is a Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She joined Edinburgh in 2021 as an Early Career Fellow after completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge. Her current research explores postcolonial intermediality in work by contemporary French and francophone female filmmakers. Her first monograph, Marguerite Duras and Claire Denis: Cinema at the Edge of the Political (in preparation for Legenda), examines the links between ethics, politics and experimental cinematic form. She is co-editor of the volume Rage: Affect and Resistance in Post-1968 French and Francophone Culture and Thought (forthcoming, Peter Lang), and is currently co-editing a special issue on care for Paragraph.
Responsibilities & affiliations
Co-Principal Investigator, The Digital Public Space Research Network (Una Europa): https://www.ucm.es/digitalpublicspace
Project Member, Artificial Intelligence & Humanities (101): Developing a Humanities Syllabus for AI & the Digital: https://aihumanities101.com/
Undergraduate teaching
Intimacy, Power, Identity: The Films of Claire Denis
Cultural Responses to War
French 2: Literature and Culture
French 2: Language
Picturing the Self: Contemporary French and Francophone Life Writing
French-English Translation for Francophone Students
Postgraduate teaching
MSc Intermediality: Film, Literature, and Race: Postcolonialism, Decoloniality, and Critical Race Theory
MSc Translation Studies: Portfolio of Written Translation in French
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes
Research summary
Dr Pleming's research reflects on connections between cinematic representation, ethics, and politics. Her current research focuses on postcolonial intermediality in work by contemporary French and francophone female filmmakers.
She is Co-Principal Investigator on The Digital Public Space Research Network (Una Europa): https://www.ucm.es/digitalpublicspace
Monograph
Cinema at the Edge of the Political: The Films of Marguerite Duras and Claire Denis (Legenda, forthcoming 2026)
Journal Articles
Co-authored with Jasmine Cooper: Introduction to ‘Thinking Care in the Twenty-First Century’, co-edited with Jasmine Cooper, special issue of Paragraph, Vol. 48, No. 2 (July 2025)
‘Bearing witness through sound: the migrant crisis in the films of Mati Diop’, ‘Women and activism in the Francophone world’, ed. by Véronique Desnain and Caroline Verdier, special issue of Nottingham French Studies (forthcoming)
‘L’amour se dit dans un regard’? Immigration, visibility and representation in Marguerite Duras’s Les Mains négatives and Alice Diop’s Nous’, Modern and Contemporary France, published online 14 Sep 2023
‘Incest, affect and ambiguous politics in two films by Claire Denis’, Screen, Vol. 63, No. 3 (2022), pp. 309–326
‘India Song’s politics of sound’, French Screen Studies, Vol. 21, Vol. 1 (2021), pp. 60-80
Book Chapters
‘“This is a book. This is a film. This is night”: politics, ethics, and intermedial form in Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant de la Chine du Nord’, Intermedial Encounters: Identity, Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. by François Giraud and Marion Schmid (Peter Lang, 2025)
‘Staging symbolic violence: education, film and theatre in Alice Diop’s La Mort de Danton’, in Education and Contemporary French Film, ed. by Rhiannon Harries and Johns Marks (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming)
‘Desire, Temporality, “Liquid Perception”: Deleuze and the Films of Marguerite Duras’ in Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research, ed. by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2019), pp. 429–436
Special Issue (Co-editor)
‘Thinking Care in the Twenty-First Century’, co-edited with Jasmine Cooper, special issue of Paragraph, Vol. 48, No. 2 (July 2025)
Edited Volume (Co-editor)
Rage: Affect and Resistance in French and Francophone Culture and Thought: 1960–2020, co-edited with by Jasmine Cooper and Lili Owen Rowlands (Peter Lang, 2024)