College curtain inspires prize-winning essay on the future of French studies

An essay inspired by a curtain at St Catharine’s has been announced as the joint winner of a competition on the theme of ‘The Future of French Studies’, which has been organised by the editors of French Studies to celebrate the journal’s 75th anniversary. The judges could not separate submissions by Dr Sura Qadiri (2018), Dawson College Assistant Professor and the College’s Director of Studies in French, and Dr Rebekah Vince of Queen Mary University of London.

Entitled ‘The future is in the making’, Dr Qadiri’s essay will be published in January 2023 and become the focus of a roundtable discussion at the Society for French Studies annual conference later the same year. Explaining her novel approach to the competition, she commented:

“When writing this essay, I was conscious that we are facing a challenging economic and political landscape that is likely to affect educational priorities in the years ahead: this represents a moment of crisis for some, but it can also be a moment for experimentation. First and foremost, I wanted to highlight that French is a global language and that studying it at university now draws upon a rich cornucopia of time periods and materials, including but by no means limited to photography, film, philosophical treaties and indeed fabrics.

“Taking the fabric from the College curtain as inspiration, and applying what I had learnt from a recent quilting course, I sought to perform something innovative and creative while advocating for a similar approach to the discipline as a whole. I look forward to exploring these ideas further with Dr Vince and others at the roundtable event scheduled for next year so our field can encourage and embrace new avenues of thinking.”

In 2020, Dr Qadiri established a ‘sewcial’ group to bring together people at St Catharine’s who enjoy crafts. The group now meets regularly and is in the midst of a special project called ‘Threads of Hope’, which aims to create a patchwork textile that reflects the experiences of students, staff and Fellows during the pandemic. Contact Dr Qadiri directly to find out more and get involved.

The curtain fabric featured by Dr Qadiri in her essay was made available for the Threads of Hope project to reuse, having been removed from the windows in the College’s old dining hall. The hall is currently being renovated and modernised as part of the Central Spaces project, which is due for completion later this summer.

Professor Martin Crowley, Director of French at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, and General Editor of French Studies, said on behalf of the judging panel:

“We were delighted by the quality of the submissions we received, and Dr Qadiri’s essay stood out for us by the way it combines conceptual ambition with attention to the details of the activities that constitute our discipline, and by its inspiring sense of how those activities might be expansively understood and inflected so as to open a dynamic and committed future.”

Find out more about studying Medieval and Modern Languages at St Catharine’s.