College: Fitzwilliam
Email: wmrs3@cam.ac.uk
Supervisor: Professor Emma Wilson
Research Topic: Chantal Akerman and Georges Perec: Place and Memory
About
Wilfred began his PhD on Chantal Akerman and Georges Perec 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.
Research
Wilfred’s project looks critically at Chantal Akerman and Georges Perec, whose work, across writing and the moving image, is arguably guided by two key, entangled concerns: place (lieu) and memory. In their work, there is significant attentiveness to interiors and cityscapes and both what happens and has happened there. The ways they record, write and film these places invite reflection on how we inhabit the world and process the past, especially the trauma of the Holocaust and its aftereffects.
His doctoral research interrogates how ressassement and recherche shape their oeuvres, drawing on the concept of lieu, as attended to by thinkers such as Roland Barthes (lieux rhétoriques) and Georges Didi-Huberman. 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 (photography, drawing and literature), critical and literary theory, life-writing and the work of Walter Benjamin, Marcel Proust and Alix Cléo Roubaud.
Scholarships/Prizes
Cambridge Le Bas scholarship (2023-26)
Odette de Mourgues grant (2024)
Fitzwilliam College travel funding (2024)
Postgraduate tutors’ prize for distinction (2023)
Robert Lethbridge scholarship in Modern Languages (2022)
Teaching
Wilfred supervises on FRB2: Translation from French at Part IA and teaches Critical Theory at Parts IA and II.
Conference papers
‘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, Switzerland, 3-4 October 2024
‘Round and Round: Georges Perec’s Les Lieux d’une fugue (1978)’, Cambridge French Graduate Research Seminar, 7 March 2024
