Dr Lillian Fontaine
- Teaching Associate in Francophone Postcolonial Studies
Contact
Location
- Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 9DA
About
Dr Fontaine is an early career researcher and Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, specialising in Francophone Postcolonial Studies. At Cambridge, she teaches across the MML tripos, including Papers FR1, FR6 and FR12, as well as Final Year Translation. Along with Prof. Charles Forsdick, she also co-convenes an MPhil module on De/Post-Colonial Studies.
Lillian completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford (St Anne’s College) in 2024, where she was also a Stipendiary Lecturer and Graduate Development Scholar, before taking up a Teaching and Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. Originally from Australia, Lillian completed her undergraduate and Honours degrees at the University of Sydney, where she won the University Medal for her 20,000-word thesis on the politics and ethics of postcolonial ‘rewritings’, written in French. She has also studied at Sciences Po, Paris in 2015.
Research
Research interests
- Postcolonial and decolonial thought
- Francophone North Africa
- Caribbean and Senegalese literature and film
- Transnational storytelling and ‘world’ literatures
- 20th and 21st-century French philosophy (especially existentialism & Absurdism)
- Derridean deconstruction - theories of spectrality - intertextuality
- Translation Studies
Lillian’s research operates at the intersection of francophone literature, postcolonial studies, and the aesthetics of revolution. Her doctoral project examined the ‘spectrality of intertextuality’ in Algerian writing since the 1990s décennie noire, positing literary hauntology as an increasingly future-focussed phenomenon that can serve to challenge fossilised state narratives and religious dogma. Her current project, ‘Multimodal Maghreb: Literature, Politics and Aesthetic Experimentation in Francophone North Africa’, investigates post-Arab Spring cultural production across North Africa to assess how the emerging avant-garde movement is probing the limits of what constitutes 'literature' and redefining the role and perception of the writer in the wake of prolonged conflict and censorship.
Dr Fontaine’s work has received multiple prizes, including the Prix Jeune Chercheur.euse (Young Scholars’ Prize), awarded by the Conseil International d’Études Francophones in 2023. Last year, she co-organised a 3-day international conference on ‘Postcolonial Temporalities: Space, Time and Identity in the Maghreb’ (IASH, June 2025) and also ran a series of Faculty Research Seminars at the University of Edinburgh (2024-25). She is currently co-editing a related special issue for the Journal of North African Studies with Dr Abdelbaqi Ghorab.
She has also presented at over a dozen international conferences.
Teaching and supervision
Lillian has taught widely at both undergraduate and postgraduate level on topics spanning French literature, culture and language from the 12th to the 21st centuries. She has also supervised Masters theses and served as Course Organiser for all of First Year French at the University of Edinburgh (166 students). In addition to her work at Oxford, Edinburgh and Cambridge, Lillian has also taught for Stanford University as part of an exchange programme in Oxford in 2023, where she designed and taught a course on Comparative Francophone Literatures.
A keen advocate for widening access to Higher Education, Lillian has been involved in a number of Admissions and Outreach initiatives, and has also worked part-time as an Academic Mentor for Sixth Form students at Oxford High School (2023-24, 2026).