CFP: Society for French Studies Postgraduate Conference 2025

Friday 30th May 2025 at King’s College London

Keynote: Dr Sophie Marie Niang (University of Cambridge)

About the conference

This year’s Society for French Studies Postgraduate Conference invites Master’s and doctoral students to reflect on the theme of ‘conditions’. Held annually, this conference offers postgraduates the opportunity to share and discuss research-in-progress with a supportive and collaborative audience.

Contributions are invited from across the full (and ever-expanding) range of fields, disciplines, cultures, historical time periods and geographies that make up French and Francophone Studies today. Papers will consider what it means to navigate ‘conditions’ and the diverse senses conveyed by that term.

Conditions might be understood as requirements, restrictions or contingencies: for example, as stipulations on which certain concepts or communities depend; or, alternatively, as factors that regulate futurity, historical understanding or political action. In the French and francophone context, therefore, conditions might recall the limits and exclusions of nation-building and Republican universalism; or, past and present debates around topics including citizenship, community, revolutionary change, (non-)violence, (de)colonisation and historiography.

Conditions could also evoke the hypothetical or counterfactual; questions of information, communication and pedagogy; or, if understood in purely philosophical terms, the conditions of possibility. Contributions may wish to re-evaluate questions of epistemology, particularly those regarding the production and mediation of knowledge by experience and/or reason. The immediate connotations of ‘conditions’ also stand for potential, recalling the generative value of cultural and linguistic study in French and Francophone Studies and beyond.

Accordingly, contributions might direct their attention towards methodological or self-reflexive concerns. The ambivalence of conditions could be examined as a symptom of tensions between theory and praxis; or as a clarion call to rethink the structures, functions and responsibilities associated with academic inquiry. Stretching across textual, visual, sonic and material cultures, the conference theme also invites papers interested in materiality, media and genre, as well as those addressing the interplay between conditions and technology, whether historical or contemporary.

Linguistic approaches to the conference theme are also encouraged, including considerations of contact zones and the linguistic expression of power dynamics.

Suggested lines of enquiry

• Conditions and the law
• Physical states and modes of being
• Creation, production and degeneration
• Conditions, discourse and linguistics
• Architectural conditions and the built environment
• Conditions and sociology
• Race and movement
• Conditions to community, belonging, freedom and liberation
• Discrimination and selective solidarity
• Medical humanities
• Disciplinarity
• Necessity versus contingency
• Moral conditions
• Bioethics and biopolitics

Presentation guidelines

• Presentations should be no more than 15 minutes in length
• Papers may be given in French or English
• The conference will be held in-person at King’s College London
• The venue has step-free access

Benefits

• Registration and catering are free of charge
• Students who are members of the Society for French Studies are eligible to apply for funding to help with transport costs
• Speakers who are non-members are kindly asked to seek financial help from their own institutions to cover travel costs
• After the conference, there will be the opportunity to publish papers in a special issue of French Studies Bulletin

Information about joining the Society (at a discount rate for postgraduates) can be found on the Society’s website.

To apply, please send an abstract (300 words max.) along with your name, institution (if applicable), and level of study to sfspg2025@gmail.com by 3 March 2025.

If you have any questions, including questions about accessibility, please contact the organisers at the above address.