Dr Lillian Fontaine
Early Career Teaching & Research Fellow
- French & Francophone Studies
- Department of European Languages and Cultures
- School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Contact details
- Email: lillian.fontaine@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Room 1.05
21 Buccleuch Place - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9LN
Availability
Office Hours: Tues 2-3pm/Thurs 11am-12pm
Background
Lillian has recently completed her PhD at the University of Oxford, where she was also a Stipendiary Lecturer and Graduate Development Scholar. Her research focuses on francophone postcolonial literature with a particular interest in haunting and intertextuality in contemporary Algerian writing.
Before moving to the UK, Lillian studied Languages at the University of Sydney, double majoring in French and Italian, and won the University Medal for her thesis, which analysed the politics and ethics of intertextuality between Albert Camus's L'Étranger (1942) and a contemporary postcolonial 'rewriting' of the canonical work by Kamel Daoud, entitled Meursault, contre-enquête (2014). Lillian has also spent some time studying at Sciences Po in Paris and is now an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Last year, she was awarded the Prix Jeune Chercheur by the Conseil International d'Études Francophones (CIÉF) for her research paper on national identity in the Maghreb.
Lillian has taught widely across 19th-21st century French literature and culture, as well as Translation (theory and practice) and Language. While working for various Oxford colleges and also Stanford University's exchange programme in Oxford, she created her own courses on topics such as Transnational Storytelling, Postcolonial Dystopia, Algeria and France: Rewriting a Colonial (Hi)story?, Gender and Autobiography in Assia Djebar, Memory and Migration in the Maghreb, Black Female Resistance in Senegalese Film, and Caribbean Creativity (Négritude, antillanité, créolité).
A keen advocate for widening access to Higher Education, Lillian has been involved in a number of Outreach initiatives, such as running 'taster' sessions on French literature for prospective students and serving as Admissions interviewer for Undergraduate entry into Oxford University from 2020-2022. She has also worked as an Academic Mentor at Oxford High School alongside her teaching and studies, which involved supervising Yr 12 Extended Research Projects, providing advice and guidance on essay writing and critical thinking, and running a series of workshops on 'la francophonie', entitled 'French or Francophone? An Introduction to Postcolonial Poet(h)ics'. The aim of these sessions was to bring awareness to high school students about the wider French-speaking world, which is often omitted from, or marginalised in, school syllabi.
Responsibilities & affiliations
Course Organiser, 1st Year Advanced French (French 1B)
Organising Committee, DELC Research Seminar Series
University of Oxford Post-Award Member
Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK
Undergraduate teaching
French 1B Course Organiser
French 1B - Language (writing & grammar focus)
French 1B - Literature & Civilisation (20th century social and political history, literature, film)
French 2 - Language (prose, précis, translation)
French 2 - Literature & Culture (covers works from 12th-19th centuries)
I am also lecturing on the combined French 1A/1B course and supervising final Honours projects.
Postgraduate teaching
MSc in Translation Studies - Written Portfolio Course
Supervision of Masters dissertations (Comp Lit, Intermediality)
Research summary
Lillian’s research revolves around the ‘spectrality of intertextuality’ in contemporary francophone literature, with a particular focus on Algerian writing. Her doctoral project interrogates the role and perceptions of the writer in the wake of prolonged conflict, and posits literary haunting as an increasingly future-focused phenomenon, one that is evolving from representing buried trauma, loss, and dispossession under colonial rule to symbolising uncertainty and even warnings about independent futures for a generation that has no direct experience of colonisation.
Mobilising Jacques Derrida’s theory of 'hauntologie', wherein the figure of the spectre incarnates ambivalence, liminality, and epistemological instability, Lillian’s focus is two-fold. She is not only interested in how phantomatic imagery is being used as a means of ‘exorcising’ a deeply traumatic colonial history but, moreover, in how conceiving of literature and storytelling as inherently spectral artforms themselves can present a challenge to certain state narratives and religious dogma that seek to cement a singular, restrictive version of history and identity onto their people. This involves an assessment of various forms of cultural storytelling – whether political, historical, memorial, religious, or literary – and their impacts on national identity and cultural reinvention. In particular, Lillian’s thesis examines what the growing postcolonial trend of ‘rewriting’ classic works – from the French, Arabic, and English canons – can reveal about Algeria’s changing concerns as it moves further and further away from its colonial past.
Lillian is now turning her focus to multimodality and the avant-garde in Maghrebi writing since the Arab Spring, exploring how more experimental, genre-meshing works of the last decade are probing the limits of what constitutes 'literature' in order to encourage new forms of civic participation. Her wider academic interests include 20th and 21st century French and francophone thought, especially: postcolonial theory; world literature; North African and Caribbean writing; deconstructionism; notions of the ‘postsecular’; memory and migration studies; necropolitics, existentialism and absurdist philosophy; women's writing; autofiction; and islamogauchisme.
For publications and awards, please see: https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/persons/lillian-fontaine.
Organiser
Conference co-organiser, with Abdelbaqi Ghorab, 'Postcolonial Temporalities: Space, Time and Identity in the Maghreb', Institue for Advanced Study in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, 19-20 June 2025 (Susan Manning Workshop Grant)
Papers delivered
‘The Body as Book: Literary (and Literal) Possession in Kamel Daoud’s Zabor ou les psaumes’, Australian Society for French Studies Conference, University of Sydney, 6-8 December 2023
‘Contre l’identité nationale : Les spectres interculturels et intertextuels dans la littérature maghrebine contemporaine’, Congrès du CIÉF, Hammamet (Tunisia), 19-25 June 2023 – invited for publication in Nouvelles Études Francophones as winning paper of the conference competition
‘The Writer as Prophet, Saviour, or Scapeghost? Storytelling and the Postsecular in Kamel Daoud's Zabor ou les psaumes (2017)’, British Comparative Literature Association ECR Conference, Warwick University, 12-13th October 2023 (unable to attend due to illness)
‘Spectral Storytelling and the Role of the Writer in Kamel Daoud’, Oxford Modern French Research Seminar, Maison Française d'Oxford, 18 May 2023
‘La vie est dans le mouvement perpétuel des hommes et des idées’: Transnational storytelling in the work of Salim Bachi’, Australian Society for French Studies Conference, 13-14 December 2022, Victoria University Wellington, New Zealand
‘Stories as Revenants in Contemporary Algerian Francophone Literature’, Society for French Studies 63rd Annual Conference, Queen’s University Belfast, 27-29 June 2022
‘Ghostly Encounters Between Texts Across Time: Rewriting and Retelling in Francophone Algerian Literature’, Society for the Study of French History Annual Conference: ‘Rencontres’, Exeter College, University of Oxford, 10-13 April 2022
'Contre contre-enquête ? La spectralité de l’intertextualité dans Meursault, contre-enquête', Postgraduate French Conference, ASMCF & SSFH, Queen’s University Belfast, 7 March 2020
‘Réécrire L’Étranger « de droite à gauche » : Le spectre de Camus et du patrimoine littéraire français en Algérie’, French Graduate Research Seminar, Oxford, March 2020