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Dear Colleagues
Welcome to the AUPHF website. I hope that it
will provide the kind of information you are looking for, both about the
Association itself and about the discipline of French Studies more generally.
Like all other Subject Associations, AUPHF exists
to serve the subject constituency, representing its interests, monitoring its
changing needs and encouraging the exchange of ideas. The AUPHF is first port
of call when the Funding Councils, the AHRC and other research support
bodies, or the British or French governments are consulting UK
academics in our field. While a number of other Associations represent
particular areas of our field, it is AUPHF's role to bring together those who
are responsible for the direction and organization of the subject. Since our
role and remit are wide-ranging, the precise nature of our aims is set out in
the Mission
Statement that we have published on this site.
It is crucial that we should represent as fully
as possible the range of French studies in the UK’s
and Ireland’s
HEIs today. Membership is open to all Professors of French and to Heads of
French Departments or Sections in the UK
and Ireland,
or to those who can claim to have an equivalent leadership role in the
discipline.
In many ways French Studies in
the UK and Ireland
are thriving. Statistics show that graduates of French and other Modern
Foreign Languages have some of the best prospects of finding appropriate
employment when they leave university. For graduates of all Modern Foreign
Languages, the combination of a range of specific and transferable skills
with the proven ability to communicate in and between English and the target language,
plus the important ‘value added’ of the year abroad, makes our students
highly employable. Yet French also has a specificity, an importance and even
an ‘exceptional’ quality compared to other Modern Foreign Languages studied
at university level in the UK
and Ireland.
Historically, it has been the primary language taught at school level in our
countries, and is still essential because of the logical and natural interest
in the history, language and culture of our closest continental neighbour. Further, French Studies at HEI level has,
in recent years, been the first field in Modern Foreign Languages genuinely
to internationalize, globalize and become transnational.
The results of the last RAE confirmed that
French studies in the UK
are more lively and dynamic than they have ever been. Interdisciplinarity came
early to us and we cover an exceptionally wide spectrum of research and
scholarship, with exciting and important research being produced at both
postgraduate and staff level in a vast span of fields. As the French Studies community faces the new challenges
presented by RAE 2008, the AUPHF is taking an active part, as can be seen
from our publications, meetings and conferences. We are also currently
developing a series of reports on crucial areas of the discipline: pre-1789
French Studies, the student year abroad experience, and teaching in translation
are three current projects.
On this website you will find information about
events and workshops we have run in the past few years, responses that we
have co-ordinated to government and other bodies, and minutes of our
meetings. We have also been collecting information relating to external
examiners and to professorial salaries in French, the results of which are
now posted on the website. We aim regularly to update this information, as
well as the important links found on our home page. Please help us to do this
job more effectively by keeping us informed.
I hope that the information on this site will
be useful to you. But I also invite you - by which I mean all of those
involved in French studies at university level in the UK
and Ireland -
to let me know what further services
the AUPHF might offer to the French Studies community, both on this website
and more generally through our activities. Thank you for your interest.
With best wishes
Lucille Cairns
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