Dr Albertine Fox

Main areas of interest

• Cinema and the audio-visual arts, with a focus on France and the Francophone world.
• Feminist documentary and listening practices 
• Film history, film sound and musicology 
• Gender and sexuality studies

Research projects

My research explores cinematic sound and spectatorial experience in French and Francophone screen media. My current book project on listening offers a new critical perspective on the experiential possibilities of feminist documentary filmmaking, in and beyond France. Resisting verbocentric (and monolingual) conventions that give secondary status to the material-musical aspects of vocal sound and auditory expression, it aims to transform our understanding of documentary as a multisensory medium by displacing attention from acts of looking and speaking to ways of making sense of the world through listening. 

Supported by the award of a one-year Faculty Research Fellowship in 2023, this research builds on previous collaborative projects and publications on listening and the face-to-face encounter in documentaries from the Francophone world, including an extended conversation, in English and French, with the documentary filmmaker Katy Léna Ndiaye, accompanied by the essay 'Collaborative Listening, Collaborative Pedagogy' in Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies, and an interview and collaboration with the Lebanese filmmaker Corine Shawi in Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies.

My recent open-access article in Screen on lesbian representation and listening discusses the romantic comedy-drama Sukkar banat/Caramel (2007) by Nadine Labaki, and the experimental short film Three Centimetres (2018) by Lara Zeidan. I have also published work on the films, documantaries and installations of the Belgian filmmaker and video artist Chantal Akerman, including her musical collaboration with the cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton (in MIRAJ, French Screen Studies, and Paragraph). This followed a book chapter on Akerman’s documentary De l’autre côté, shot on the US-Mexico border, which was published in Chantal Akerman: Afterlives (Legenda, 2019), co-edited by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson. 

Past research projects

My first monograph, entitled Godard and Sound: Acoustic Innovation in the Late Films of Jean-Luc Godard (I.B.Tauris, 2017), re-evaluates the multimedia work of the Swiss-French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard from an auditory perspective, expanding current typologies of film sound and prompting new debates about the relationship between sound, the moving image, and the film spectator. This book was based on my PhD thesis and it came out in paperback with Bloomsbury in 2020. 

In 2014, I received the Susan Hayward Prize by the Association for Studies in French Cinema, and in 2012 I was awarded the R.H. Gapper Postgraduate Essay Prize by the Society for French Studies for my work on Godard's cinema. Prior to this, in 2007, my undergraduate essay on three novels by Marguerite Duras was awarded a Joint runner-up prize in the R.H. Gapper Undergraduate Essay competition, run by the Society for French Studies. This was published in 2008 as the short article 'Writing the Rhythms of Desire: Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, L’Amour and L’Amant' in French Studies Bulletin, A Quarterly Supplement.  

PhD and MA supervision

I co-supervise theory and practice-based PhD and MPhil theses on a range of subjects, including:

• Sound in Chantal Akerman's cinema
• The documentary practice of Trinh T. Minh-ha
• Female disability and the senses in libertine literature
• Subjectivity and sensory experience in letters by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire

I have also supervised MA dissertations on a broad range of topics including: the ethics of Trinh T. Minh-ha's theory and film; Sinophone lesbian cinema; screening female heroines; female corporeal experiences in English-language translations of Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical works.

Administrative roles

I have acted as Director of Teaching in French, Postgraduate Teaching Officer for the School of Modern Languages, and Interim Programme Director for the Faculty of Arts' MA Black Humanities (cover for a staff member on leave).

Background

Before joining Bristol, I completed my BA in French with Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, followed by an MA by Research in French on the cinema of Marguerite Duras. I later completed my PhD at Royal Holloway on the post-1979 film and video work of Jean-Luc Godard before taking up a three-year postdoctoral Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge. I have also completed HEA Fellowship schemes at Bristol and Royal Holloway.