People

Jessica Goodman

Project Leader

Jessica Goodman is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in French at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, where she teaches Early Modern French literature and French language. Her research interests lie predominantly in the eighteenth century, and her first book tracked the Parisian career of the Italian dramatist Carlo Goldoni. Jessica has written on a range of topics including anonymity and collaborative composition in the Italian theatre, the administrative history of the Comédie-Italienne in Paris, the use of digital humanities to study early modern theatre records, textual commemoration and early modern celebrity. She has contributed to the Voltaire Foundation’s Complete Works of Voltaire, and recently produced an edition of plays written to commemorate the death of the revolutionary politician Honoré de Mirabeau.Her current project, Imagined Afterlives, examines the notion of posterity in the late eighteenth century, with a particular focus on how authors employed ideas of projection, fiction, and the imagination to grapple with the idea of their own mortality.

Before undertaking her undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Worcester College, Oxford, Jessica attended a state school in Cardiff. She remains very committed to outreach activities, running the French strand of the UNIQ summer school, attending national UCAS conferences and delivering lectures and seminars to school groups of various sizes and ages, in Oxford and beyond.

Twitter: @GoodmanJess

Nupur Patel

Project Administrative Assistant

Nupur Patel is a second-year DPhil student of Early Modern French at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. Having completed a BA in History and French, followed by an MSt in Modern Languages (French), she has begun her doctoral research which considers the notion of pudeur, more specifically the ways in which four sixteenth-century French women writers respond to pudeur in their printed works, by way of addressing the female body. 

Before pursuing higher education, Nupur attended a state school in Greater London and was introduced to the University of Oxford as part of an outreach project, Aim Higher. Throughout her time at university, she has remained dedicated to access and outreach work. She is an Oxford First-Gen ambassador and student ambassador for Lincoln College. Alongside volunteering at open days, she has taught French grammar for the UNIQ summer school. Her role as MCR President of Lincoln College has given her the opportunity to contribute to the College’s access and outreach strategy for engagement with state schools across the UK. During the summer vacation, she particularly enjoys volunteering as a languages assistant at her old secondary school and delivering presentations on higher education at Oxbridge to teachers and students.

Joanne Brueton

Early Career Researcher

Joanne Brueton is a Lecturer in French Studies at the University of London in Paris, where she teaches contemporary French and Francophone literature and culture. Following her undergraduate studies in Modern and Medieval Languages at St John’s College, Cambridge, Joanne began specialising in the poetic activism of political dissident Jean Genet. Her monograph, Geometry in Jean Genet: Shaping the Subject (Oxford: Legenda, 2021) is forthcoming next Spring, and she has written widely on Genet’s creative play with North-South politics, his relationship to Palestine, nomadism, and the cultural legacy of imperialism. Her research has also ventured into more abstract territory, with a co-authored book on mathematics and poetry in Samuel Beckett, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Roland Barthes. Her current project, Decolonising canons, maps the legacy of metropolitan French authors in Maghrebi fiction and traces queer diaspora across the Francophone world.

Joanne is passionate about outreach and closing the gap between Key Stage 5 and undergraduate learning. She attended a state school in Stratford-upon-Avon and pursued her PGCE at a Sixth Form academy for disadvantaged students with high academic potential in London, setting up programmes with Oxford, Cambridge and the University of London to widen access and admissions. 

Twitter: @BruetonJoanne

Sky Herington

Early Career Researcher

Sky Herington is a second-year PhD candidate in the French department at the University of Warwick. Her research interests lie in 20th century Francophone African literature, theatre and performance, and her thesis explores the role of the body in plays by the Congolese writer and director, Sony Labou Tansi.

She completed an MA in Comparative Literature at the École normale supérieure de Lyon, France and a BA in French and Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Before this, she attended a state school in the West Midlands.

She has a PGCE in Modern Foreign Languages and has experience teaching French and Spanish at KS3-KS5. While working in a school in East London, she set up an outreach project for pupils funded by the King’s College Advocate Award to improve access to Higher Education, and is excited about developing this work with the MLOE project.

Twitter: @SkyHerington

Eleanor Hodgson

Early Career Researcher

Eleanor completed her PhD in medieval French literature in 2015 at the University of Sheffield, where she was involved in a number of outreach activities through the ‘Routes into Languages’ programme. Eleanor’s interest in outreach and her passion for teaching led her to complete secondary teacher training as part of the post-doctoral programme ‘Researchers in Schools’, during which time she supported students with outreach opportunities, including a medieval French reading group. Eleanor returned to academia in 2017, taking up a one-year lectureship in French at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she taught across language and culture modules and further developed her secondary research interest in French rap. After 18 months working as an Evaluation Specialist for a widening participation outreach project in the South West, Eleanor joined the University of Exeter in January 2020 as a Lecturer in French, teaching language, medieval literature, and a new module on French rap.

Twitter: @elemh87

Richard Mason

Early Career Researcher

Richard Mason is Lecturer in French at Queen Mary University of London, where he is also Outreach Lead for the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures. His current research looks at educational thought, practice and politics in France in the twentieth century, and in particular, at the relationship between learning to read and write, self-expression and institutional life. He hopes to use the MLOE project to introduce students to a rich archive of disruptive and experimental ideas about education in France, to encourage critical reflection on the ways in which schools and universities nurture or inhibit personal and collective expression in both first- and foreign language contexts today, and to connect this to wider questions about the politics of education.

Twitter: @MasonRichardF

Jordan McCullough

Early Career Researcher

Jordan McCullough is a PhD candidate in French Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. Prior to commencing his doctoral research, he completed a BA in French and Spanish; followed by an MRes in Arts and Humanities, with a literary dissertation examining the role of religion and spirituality in the lives of terminal patients and their families. His PhD project continues this Medical Humanities focus, addressing the role of writing in the grieving and healing processes of parents who have lost children through terminal illness or sudden, unanticipated death.

Throughout his undergraduate and postgraduate studies, Jordan has been heavily involved in outreach and engagement. He is a student ambassador for Modern Languages at QUB, has participated in a number of outreach events and is actively involved in post-primary language teaching. He is a passionate advocate for Modern Languages and enjoys nothing more than opening students’ eyes to the endless opportunities that can come about through the study of other languages and cultures.

Twitter: @j_o_mccullough

Marieke Mueller

Early Career Researcher

Marieke Mueller is a Lecturer in French at Aberystwyth University. She previously completed her DPhil at Oxford and taught at King’s College London and Paris Nanterre. Her research area is 20th- and 21st-century literature and philosophy in French. Her doctoral project looked at Jean-Paul Sartre’s biography of Gustave Flaubert and her current research concerns contemporary literature, in particular women’s writing and narratives of social mobility. She is also developing a new book project on narrative and violence.

Her teaching includes modules on gender in French culture, representations of colonialism, ‘Introduction to French Studies’, as well as French language and translation classes. She is the Admissions Tutor in the Modern Languages Department, and she very much enjoys being in touch with applicants, and working with A-Level students by providing taster sessions. 

Joanna Raisbeck

Early Career Researcher

Joanna Raisbeck is currently a Stipendiary Lecturer in German Literature at Wadham College, University of Oxford, and at The Queen’s College, Oxford. She attended a state grammar school in Salisbury before taking undergraduate and graduate degrees in German at Oxford. She was inspired to study German by attending a summer school run as part of a government-funded programme called the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth.

Her research focuses on German Romanticism. She has broader interests in the literature, literary historiography, and philosophy of the long eighteenth century. Her doctoral thesis, which was completed in early 2020, was concerned with poems, prose, and plays of the Early Romantic poet and philosopher Karoline von Günderrode (1780-1806). For more information on her research work, see her Oxford faculty page.

Twitter: @Joanna_Raisbeck

Lucy Rayfield

Early Career Researcher

Lucy is Lecturer in Modern Languages at the University of Bristol and Research Associate at St Benet’s Hall, University of Oxford. Her work is comparative and she focuses mainly on comedy and laughter in sixteenth-century France and Italy, which is the subject of her forthcoming book, Poetics, Performance and Politics in French and Italian Renaissance Comedy. She is also interested in satire, and how this was used as a political weapon in the Wars of Religion. Lucy attended a state school in the town of Aberdare in South Wales, and is strongly committed to outreach. She has given talks for the Seren Network, taught classes at the UNIQ summer school, and coordinated workshops on French and Italian in a number of Oxford Colleges. In 2015 she also founded Vitruvian Productions, a theatre company touring schools and community centres with free performances of little-known classical and Renaissance plays.

Twitter: @DrLucyRayfield