Dr Albertine Fox
Phd (Lond.), MA (Lond.), BA (Lond.)
Expertise
Albertine is developing a book project on listening and the face-to-face encounter in a selection of female-directed documentaries by French and francophone filmmakers.
Current positions
Senior Lecturer in French Film
Department of French
Contact
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Biography
Albertine was educated at a comprehensive school and she developed her love of cinema, music, and literature during her A-Levels at a further education college. Here she was introduced to films by Leos Carax, Mathieu Kassovitz, and Louis Malle, studied music by Dmitri Shostakovich, and read poetry and literature by Jacques Prévert, Joseph Joffo, Toni Morrison, and Carol Ann Duffy. After completing her undergraduate degree, Albertine spent time living and working in Montpellier and Paris, where she first came across Chantal Akerman’s 1970s films and this experience inspired her to embark on a PhD. She has also worked as an administrator at a Pupil Referral Unit for young people, and as a TESOL assistant, providing English language support to refugees and asylum seekers. Albertine has also completed CPD certified training run by the National Autistic Society and CPD accredited Disability Equality Training.
Research interests
Albertine Fox is Senior Lecturer in French Film. At undergraduate level she convenes modules on 'Introduction to French Cinema', 'Francophone Women Directors: Documentary Filmmaking' and 'Chantal Akerman's Cinema: Queering Conventions and Screening Desire'. She also co-teaches on School-wide modules.
Albertine's main areas of research are: French and francophone cinema, women's filmmaking, documentary and experimental film, spectatorship and the listener, sound-image relationships, film theory and feminism, queer theory, gender and sexuality.
She is currently developing a book project on listening spaces and the face-to-face encounter in documentaries from the Francophone world. Albertine has recently published two related projects: a special conversation with the documentary filmmaker, Katy Léna Ndiaye, accompanied by the essay 'Collaborative Listening, Collaborative Pedagogy' in Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies, and an interview and collaboration with the Lebanese filmmaker Corine Shawi in Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies.
Since 2018, Albertine has published three peer-reviewed articles in MIRAJ, French Screen Studies, and Paragraph on works by the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, encompassing her installation art (Maniac Shadows), short film (Trois Strophes sur le nom de Sacher), documentary (Sud), and her musical collaboration with the cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton. Albertine has also published a book chapter on Akerman’s documentary De l’autre côté, shot on the US-Mexico border, in Chantal Akerman: Afterlives (Legenda, 2019, co-edited by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson).
Albertine's first monograph, Godard and Sound: Acoustic Innovation in the Late Films of Jean-Luc Godard (Bloomsbury, 2017/2020), re-evaluates the multimedia work of the Swiss-French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard from an auditory perspective, expanding current typologies of film sound and prompting new debates about the relationship between sound, the moving image, and the film spectator.
In 2014, Albertine was awarded the Susan Hayward Prize by the Association for Studies in French Cinema, and in 2012 she was awarded the R.H. Gapper Postgraduate Essay Prize by the Society for French Studies.
Publications
Recent publications
01/01/2022Extreme States: Remixing Cinema, Visual Art, and Music in Godard's Puissance de la parole (1988) (reprinted in full; originally pub. 2015)
Contemporary Literary Criticism
'Collaborative Listening, Collaborative Pedagogy'
Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies
Seeing and Listening Differently: An exchange with the documentary filmmaker, Katy Léna Ndiaye
Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies
Voir et Écouter Autrement: Un échange avec la cinéaste documentariste, Katy Léna Ndiaye
Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies
Hearing the Crackles in the Background: Listening and Female Intimacy in 'Portrait of a Lady on Fire'
Teaching
Albertine contributes to Year 1 core teaching in the French Department, which includes sessions on Michael Haneke's 2005 film Caché, as well as final-year Translation.
At postgraduate level, Albertine teaches sessions on the MA Comparative Literatures and Cultures ('Cultural Encounters' and 'Theories of Visual Cuture'), covering set work by Chantal Akerman, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Jocelyne Saab. She has also contributed to the MA Applied Translation and she co-supervises MPhil and PhD students. Albertine acts as Postgraduate Teaching Officer for the School, looking after the running of SML's MA Programmes.
Supervisory interests
Albertine is open to supervising PhD candidates on a range of topics in the broad areas of cinema and documentary film studies, encompassing any of the areas outlined here:
- French and francophone cinema
- Women's filmmaking
- Documentary and experimental film
- Spectatorship
- Sound-image relationships
- Film theory and feminism
- Queer theory
- Gender and sexuality