Dr Helen Abbott

Name:

Helen Abbott

Position:

Lecturer in French

Email:

h.abbott@bangor.ac.uk

Location:

Room 341, New Arts Building

Phone:

01248 382119 (2119 internal)

I studied for my first degree in French and Italian at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and after a short spell working as an investment banking analyst in the city, I returned to academia. During 2002-3, I studied for an MA in the French department at King’s College London, working on authors as varied as Montaigne, Boileau, and Baudelaire. I came to Bangor in September 2006 following the completion of my PhD at King’s entitled ‘The Aesthetics of Voice in the works of Baudelaire and Mallarmé’, supervised by Prof. Anne Green, which has now been published as a monograph with Ashgate. For a period of research leave in 2010-2011, I was awarded a Visiting Fellowship at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies (University of London) and an AHRC Early Career Fellowship in order to research my new monograph on textual and musical re-workings of Baudelaire’s ‘La Mort des amants’, following on from a British Academy small research grant in 2008. My postgraduate research (2002-2006) was also funded by the AHRC, and during my time in London I taught French language and literature at King’s, and Italian language at Roehampton University. I am also a classically-trained soprano, and regularly give solo and consort recitals.

Teaching

French language
Translation skills
Nineteenth-century literature (especially poetry)
Words and Music
Critical theory
MA in European Languages and Culture (Critical theory and Aesthetic theory)
I supervise the following PhD theses:

Ellie Sutcliffe: Voicing Collective Identity through Song and Autobiography: the case of Beur-Raï music and Beur writing
Armelle Blin-Rolland: Back and forth between written and spoken: studies of transposed and reproduced voices in French literature and cinema
Sven Greitschus: Reading the Modern City in French Prose Poetry from Baudelaire to Réda

Responsibilities

Head of French

Research Interests

Rhetoric, poetics, music and aesthetics 1850-1950, with particular emphasis on theories of voice
Post-romantic French poetry, and in particular Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Verlaine, Valéry, and Post-romantic French song, and in particular Debussy, Fauré, Duparc, Vierne
Developments in aesthetic theory from the nineteenth century onwards (in particular the work of René Ghil, Jacques Rancière, and neuroscientific theories of ‘pre-movement’)
Influence of French symbolist poetics on early twentieth-century Italian poetry (in particular the poetry of Dino Campana, Eugenio Montale and Gabriele D’Annunzio)

Main publications and other research output

Monograph: Between Baudelaire and Mallarmé: Voice, Conversation and Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), ISBN 978-0-7546-6745-2. Publisher's site.
‘Failed departures and inevitable returns: impossible journeys in Baudelaire and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’ in Loïc Guyon and Andrew Watts (eds), Allers-Retours (forthcoming 2011)
‘Performing Poetry as Music: How Composers Accept Baudelaire’s Invitation to Song’, in Phyllis Weliver and Katharine Ellis (eds), Words and Notes in the Nineteenth Century (forthcoming 2011)
‘Working at the words/music interface: models of collaboration’, Contemporary Music Review 29:2 (2010), 159–169. Joint paper with Chris Collins (Bangor University)
‘Sacred rhythms, tired rhythms: Dino Campana’s poetry’, Paragraph 33:2 (2010), 260-279
‘Poetry and Music: a doomed love affair?’ French Studies Bulletin 30 (2009), 84-87, including own recording of relevant song setting together with Leverhulme-funded Pianist in Residence, Sholto Kynoch. Download from: http://fsb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/ktp033?ijkey=mA6gdo5O2GyiKuw&keytype=ref or download PDF.
‘Reading and deciphering: Mallarmé’s rhythmic sensation’, in Elizabeth Lindley and Laura McMahon (eds), Rhythms: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008)
‘Politics or poetics? Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s “Vox populi”’, Romance Studies 26:2 (2008), 126-135. Download article (PDF).
‘Music and Poetry at the Crossroads: Baudelaire, Debussy and “Recueillement”’, Dix-neuf, 8 (2007), 18-38. Joint paper in collaboration with Dr David Evans (University of St Andrews) which includes our own recordings of song settings and relevant excerpts. Download from: www.sdn.ac.uk/dixneuf/secure/April07/abbottevans/2.XIXApril2007.pdf . Paper awarded High Commendation by Society for French Studies Malcolm Bowie Prize 2008 (www.sfs.ac.uk/bowieprize.htm)

Current projects include:

Co-organiser, with Richard Langham Smith, of Debussy symposium ‘Debussy Text and Idea’ to be held in London April 2012
Collaboration with IRPALL at Université Toulouse II-Le Mirail, working on French mélodie.
Collaboration with Leverhulme Trust funded Pianist in Residence, Sholto Kynoch, working on performance of French mélodie, which culminated in a lecture-recital at the Oxford Lieder Festival in October 2009. See www.bangor.ac.uk/ml/Kynoch.php. Further collaboration is now underway on a CD recording.
I am working on a new monograph on what happens to Baudelaire’s sonnet ‘La Mort des amants’ during the course of the nineteenth century in France (including song settings).

Research Projects

Poetry Transpositions: On 21st February 2009, I co-organised a nineteenth-century French poetry colloquium entitled ‘Transpositions of Thought and Form in the Nineteenth Century and Beyond’, which marks the beginning of a new research network looking into the various domains that nineteenth-century French poetry infiltrates and influences (in particular poetry and the visual, the ethical, the musical, the official). For more details click here.
Words and Music: In 2007 I co-founded a Bangor-based interdisciplinary research group, together with colleagues from Schools of Music, English and Psychology, looking into relationships between Words and Music. Sholto Kynoch’s Leverhulme-funded residency in the School of Modern Languages forms part of this research project. Within the remit of this project, I combine my training as a soprano with my expertise in French poetry, continuing to give a number of lecture-recitals on song settings of nineteenth-century French poetry, in particular Debussy’s Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire and the Ariettes oubliées settings of Verlaine.

Reviews

I regularly write reviews for French Studies, Modern Language Review, Forum for Modern Language Studies and Times Higher Education.

Other academic-related work

Treasurer, Society of Dix-Neuviémistes March 2007-2011
Postgraduate representative, Society of Dix-Neuviémistes March 2005-2007