Dr Kate Griffiths
Overview
Telephone: +44(0)29 2087 6927
Fax: +44(0)29 2087 4946
Extension: 76927
Location: Room 2.36, 65-68 Park Place
My research focuses on the translation of canonical texts across time, media and language. It explores the adaptation of French works into different national contexts/forms/tongues and the reworking of other foreign sources for the French cultural market. While I am by training a nineteenth-century literary specialist, my research (and as a result my teaching) now spans eras (the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries) and media (film, television, literature, painting and radio).
I am currently completing two monographs related to these interests. The first, Adapting Nineteenth-Century France: Literature in Film, Theatre, Television, Radio and Print (co-authored with Dr Andrew Watts and contracted to UWP), explores how and why nineteenth-century texts continue to fascinate our cultural consciousness. It analyses the translation of key authors into specific media (Zola and radio, Balzac and silent cinema, Maupassant and television, Hugo and musical theatre, Flaubert and fiction, Verne and sound film). The second, Zola and Television, is designed as a companion volume to my earlier book on Zola and cinema. Zola and Television uses British and French television adaptations to underline how television offers a more natural home for Zola’s novels than any other medium.
Both of these research projects feed into the interdisciplinary, inter-institutional research group which I run with Dr Bradley Stephens (Bristol) and Dr Andrew Watts (Birmingham): ART (Adaptation, Recreation, Translation). Established in 2011, ART explores the field of adaptation in modern times. Its aim is to establish a theory of adaptation which develops both an academic and cultural understanding of this often maligned yet historically widespread process. Such an understanding is intended to facilitate a productive dialogue between critics, consumers, and practitioners, and in so doing will make a direct contribution to the creative economy.
Selected Publications
Emile Zola and the Artistry of Adaptation (Oxford: Legenda, 2009).
Institutions and Power: Nineteenth-Century French Culture and Literature, Kate Griffiths and David Evans (eds), (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011).
Haunting Presences. Ghosts in French Literature, Theory, Film and Photography, Kate Griffiths and David Evans (eds), (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009).
Pleasure and Pain: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Art, Culture and Society, Kate Griffiths and David Evans (eds), (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008).
‘Memories in/of Thérèse Raquin: Emile Zola and Marcel Carné’, French Studies, vol. 65, no. 2, 2011, pp. 188-99.
‘Mythical Returns: Televising Thérèse Raquin’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 39, no. 3, 2011, pp. 285-95.
Publications
Authored books
(co-authored with Andrew Watts) Adapting Nineteenth-Century France: Literature in Film, Theatre, Television, Radio and Print (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, contracted)
Emile Zola and the Artistry of Adaptation (Oxford: Legenda, 2009).
Refereed journal articles
‘Memories in/of Thérèse Raquin: Emile Zola and Marcel Carné’, French Studies, vol. 65, no. 2, 2011, pp. 188-99.
‘Mythical Returns: Televising Thérèse Raquin’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 39, no. 3, 2011, pp. 285-95.
‘Borrowed Identities: Mathieu Kassovitz and Djamel Bensalah’ in New Cinemas, vol. 4, no. 3, 2006, pp. 185 - 195.
‘The Ghost of the Author: Zola, Renoir and La Bête humaine’ in Excavatio, vol. 21, 2006, pp. 239 - 250.
‘La Haine and the Quest for Origin’ (co-authored with Dr R. Doughty, lecturer in film, University of Portsmouth) in Studies in European Cinema, vol. 3 no. 2, Oct. 2006, pp. 117 - 127.
‘Descartes and Lacan. Print and the Subject of Citation’, in New Zealand Journal of French Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, May 2006, pp. 16 - 28.
‘Hunt the Author: Vadim, Zola and La Curée’, in Studies in European Cinema, vol. 2 no. 1, Jun. 2005, pp. 7 - 17.
‘The Haunted Mirrors of Zola and Maupassant’, Bulletin of the Émile Zola Society, no. 26, Oct. 2002, pp. 3 - 13.
Edited books
Institutions and Power: Nineteenth-Century French Culture and Literature, Kate Griffiths and David Evans (eds), (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011).
Haunting Presences. Ghosts in French Literature, Theory, Film and Photography, Kate Griffiths and David Evans (eds), (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009).
Pleasure and Pain: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Art, Culture and Society, Kate Griffiths and David Evans (eds), (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008).
Chapters in books
‘Spectral Cinema: Buñuel, Mirbeau and The Diary of a Chambermaid’, commissioned chapter in The Companion to Luis Buñuel (forthcoming, Oxford: Blackwell 2012).
‘Visions and Revisions: Zola, Cardinal and L’Œuvre’, accepted for Sublimely Visual, Susan Harrow (ed).
‘Voicing Difference’ (co-authored with Laura Rorato) in Exercises in Translation, ed. by Joy Charnley and Malcolm Pender (Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 21 - 35.
‘Sculpting Gods. Mimesis and Mimeticism: Mimicking Gods in the work of Émile Zola’, in New Approaches to Zola, ed. by Hannah Thompson (London: The Émile Zola Society, 2003), pp. 67 - 76.
‘Scribbling Ghosts. The Textual Spectres and Spectral Texts of Émile Zola’, in Possessions: Essays in French Literature, Cinema and Theory, ed. by Julia Horn and Lynsey Russell-Watts (London: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 51 - 65.
Editorial board activity
Associate Editor of the Journal of Romance Studies
Other publications
"La Bête humaine". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 September 2008
Biography
Career Profile
After graduating with a BA in Modern and Medieval Languages and an MPhil in European Literature from Cambridge University, I spent a year studying at Harvard University on a scholarship programme. I subsequently returned to Cambridge to write a Ph.D on Psychoanalysis and Naturalism. In the final year of my studies, I worked as a temporary Lecturer at Warwick University before taking up posts at Bangor University (2002) and Swansea University (2007). I moved to take up my current post in French and Translation in Cardiff in September 2011
Recent Awards
Sep. 2006-Jan. 2007 AHRC Research Leave Grant.
May 2006 British Academy Overseas Conference Grant.
Jan. 2006 Society for French Studies Conference Organisation Grant.
Memberships and External Activities
I am Publicity Officer for the Society for French Studies and Research and Resources Officer for the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes.
Selected Recent Papers
April 2011 ‘Translating Maupassant for Television: The Anxieties of Influence’, ‘Influence’ Conference, Reid Hall, Paris.
April 2011 ‘Zola and Radio’, Birmingham University, Annual conference of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes. J
July 2010 ‘Televising Thérèse Raquin’, 51st Annual conference of the Society for French Studies.
March 2009 ‘Zola and the Art of Inheritance’, The Emile Zola Society, London.
October 2008 ‘Zola and the Artistry of Adaptation’, Birmingham University French Research Seminar.
November 2008 ‘Translating the Nineteenth-Century to the Big Screen’, Swansea University Media Research Seminar.
September 2008 ‘Zola and the Art of Obfuscation’, 12th BIRTHA Conference, Centre for the Study of Visual and Literary Cultures, University of Bristol.
August 2008 ‘High/Low: Televising Zola’, University of Wales, Lampeter, Adapting the Nineteenth Century.
July 2008 ‘Remembering and Forgetting: Zola, Carné and Thérèse Raquin’, Dublin Institute of Technology, Annual European Cinema Research Forum.
March 2008 ‘Memory and Adaptation’, Manchester University, Annual conference of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes.
Oct. 2007 ‘Shifting Origins: Zola and the Art of Adaptation’, University of St Andrews French Research Seminar.
Oct. 2007 ‘La Terre and the Art of Inheritance’, 33rd Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium, University of Alabama.
Jul. 2007 ‘Nana: Copies and Originals’, 48th Annual Conference of the Society for French Studies, Birmingham University.
Teaching Portfolio
I teach French language classes at for second- and final-years as well as level two translation. I coordinate the level two school-wide module on European fiction, contribute to its counterpart on European cinema in addition to teaching aspects of the first-year Introduction to Translation Theory module. At a post-graduate level, I convene a module on adaptation across media, as well as contributing to a variety of other modules in the French and Translation programmes.
I would welcome applications from doctoral candidates working on French cinema (silent film and French film of the pre-war years in particular), any area/era of adaptation for radio, television or film or on nineteenth-century French literature.
School Roles
I am deputy co-ordinator of the new BA in Translation scheme.