College: Lucy Cavendish
Email: klb65@cam.ac.uk
Supervisor: Prof Nicholas White
Research Topic: ‘Victime et bourreau’: The Question of Abortion in the Belle Epoque roman à thèse
About
Kathryn is in the fourth year of her part-time PhD. She completed her undergraduate degree in MML (French and Russian) at Gonville and Caius College in 2014, which she followed with a Masters in Comparative Literature at the University of Nottingham. Her final dissertation focused on depictions of female sexual agency in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) and Émile Zola's Pot-Bouille (1882). In 2016, she gained a PGCE in secondary languages from the University of Manchester and taught French and Spanish in a grammar school in South Manchester for two years before returning to academia at Cambridge in 2018. Alongside her studies, she teaches French and Spanish at a primary school in Newmarket.
Research
Kathryn's thesis analyses the representation of abortion in French novels from 1904-1907, a period where fears over the ongoing depopulation crisis brought questions of natality and women's fertility to the fore. As an issue which is still polemical to this day, the topic of abortion allows an insight into the changing attitudes towards maternity and women's control over their own bodies in France and within the French feminist movements. Using close textual analysis of five romans à thèse by a range of authors - male and female - who have largely been ignored in recent criticism, this project uncovers how these literary depictions reflected and influenced the medical, legal and ideological debates of the time.
Teaching
Undergraduate supervision: Fr5 second-year supervisor, supervisor to a Year Abroad Project, supervisor for a fourth-year Fr11 Optional Dissertation.
Conference papers
July 2021
IMLR Contemporary Womxn’s Writing and the Medical Humanities International Online Conference
‘Where was my party when I had an abortion?’: Caitlin Moran and Sara Pascoe Finding the Funny in Abortion
February 2021
IMLR Contemporary Women’s Writing and the Medical Humanities seminar
Seminar 11: Breaking Bodily Taboos
Invisible Chain: The Female Experience of Abortion Across a Century from Jeanne Caruchet’s L’Ensemencée (1904) to Annie Ernaux’s L’événement (2000)
November 2020
Cambridge Seminar Series in 19th Century French Studies
‘Sacrificed Flesh: Abortion in Camille Pert’s L’Autel’
March 2020
Institute of Modern Languages Research: Recovering Women’s Identities between Centre and Periphery (16th -20th Centuries)
‘« C’est singulier, n’est-ce pas? » Jeanne Caruchet’s non-maternal woman’
