Wilfred Skinner
- PhD student
Contact
About
Research Topic: Chantal Akerman and Georges Perec: Place and Memory
Supervisor: Professor Emma Wilson
Wilfred began his PhD in 2023. He holds an MPhil in European, Latin American and Comparative Literatures and Cultures from the University of Cambridge and a BA in English and French from University College London. After his BA, he was a lecteur d’anglais at Sorbonne Université, where he also spent his year abroad.
Conference papers
‘Chantal Akerman et Georges Perec : quelques chambres retrouvées’, Le Film de chambre : esthétiques, histoires, politiques, Université de Picardie Jules Verne/Université Paris Cité, 25 June 2026
‘Poitou to New York: Georges Perec’s Postcard-Vestiges’, Postcard Poetry and Poetics, Sorbonne Université, 5 June 2026
‘A Room Is a Room Is a Room: Chantal Akerman’, 66th Annual Conference of the Society for French Studies, University of Bristol, 2 July 2025
‘Perec et Akerman : Fables du lieu’, Journée d’étude Georges Perec, Sorbonne Université, 27 June 2025
‘Chantal Akerman, l’autoportrait et la légende’, Écrits sur l’écran : Écrire pour, dans et au sujet des productions cinématographiques et audiovisuelles, Congrès de l’AFECCAV, IMEC/Université de Caen Normandie, 19 June 2025
‘Les Dernières vagues de l’Atlantique: Chantal Akerman and Georges Perec in New York’, Oxford French Graduate Seminar, University of Oxford, 3 June 2025
‘Toute une nuit (Chantal Akerman, 1982) : topographies de l’enfance et de l’amour’, Récit et scénario dans le ‘cinéma d’auteur’, 1959-1989, Université de Lausanne, 4 October 2024
‘Round and Round: Georges Perec’s Les Lieux d’une fugue (1978)’, Cambridge French Graduate Research Seminar, University of Cambridge, 7 March 2024
Scholarships / Prizes
Cambridge Le Bas scholarship (2023-26)
Fitzwilliam College Senior Scholarship (2025, 2026)
Odette de Mourgues grant (2024, 2025, 2026)
Fitzwilliam College travel funding (2024, 2025, 2026)
Postgraduate tutors’ prize for distinction (2023)
Robert Lethbridge scholarship in Modern Languages (2022)
Research
Wilfred’s project looks at Chantal Akerman and Georges Perec, whose work foregrounds two key, entangled concerns: place (lieu) and memory. What happens and has happened in and across certain interiors and cityscapes? The ways Akerman and Perec record, write and film these places invite reflection on the quotidian and the memorial, and how we inhabit the world and process the past, especially the Holocaust and its aftereffects.
His doctoral research spotlights special places in their work – among them Paris, Brussels, New York, and Venice – to examine how they handle the personal and public memories tied to them. Archival material and recent publications, notably Akerman’s Œuvre écrite et parlée and Perec’s Lieux, strongly inform the project, which has among its aims a revalorisation of Akerman’s writing and Perec’s film work.
Other research interests include intermediality, critical and literary theory, life-writing, photography, experimental film, psychoanalysis, and the work of Marcel Proust and Alix Cléo Roubaud.
Teaching and supervision
Wilfred supervises on FR12: Ethics and Experience: Literature, Thought, and Visual Culture of the French-speaking World (1900 to the present) and FRB2: Translation from French, and co-convenes and teaches Critical Theory. He also leads a CS6: European Cinema seminar.
Other Activities and Roles
Co-convenor, Modern French Research Seminar (2025-)
Co-convenor, French Graduate Research Seminar (2024-5)
Wilfred translates from French to English and has translated interviews in a Sight and Sound special issue on Chantal Akerman. He is presently working on several literary translation projects.