Meet the Committee

Steven Wilson is Professor of French Studies and the Medical Humanities at Queen's University Belfast. He became President of ASMCF in September 2025, having previously served as a member of the Editorial Board of the Association's journal, Modern & Contemporary France, since 2020. Recent publications include the monograph The Language of Disease: Writing Syphilis in Nineteenth-Century France (Legenda, 2020) and co-edited books The Languages of COVID-19: Translational and Multilingual Perspectives on Global Healthcare (Routledge, 2023) and French Studies and the Medical Humanities: Critical Intersections (Liverpool University Press, 2026 — 'Studies in Modern and Contemporary France' series, founded in collaboration with ASMCF). He participates in a range of international scholarly networks, including as a member of the Advisory Board of Loire Val-Health, an €11.8M research project based at the Université de Tours, and is committed to public engagement on the importance of linguistic sensitivity and intercultural knowledge in global healthcare, including through policy work. 

Mark Wilson is a PhD candidate in History at Durham University. His research interests lie in aftermaths and legacies of mass violence and persecution. For his PhD thesis, he is exploring emotion, spatial experiences and meanings of place in oral histories with survivors of the Holocaust in France. Having originally studied for an undergraduate degree in History with French at Durham, Mark recently returned to academic studies alongside a career in international education and research management. Before starting the PhD, he studied a master’s degree in History at Edinburgh University, where he developed his interest in oral history and the Holocaust. He became the Membership Secretary for the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France in 2023.

Steve Wharton, Honorary Vice Secretary, is Senior Lecturer in French and Communication in the University of Bath’s Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies. He first joined the Executive Committee in 1992, serving subsequently as Hon Treasurer 1995-1998 and Hon Secretary 1998-2000. A member of the NEC of the AUT and then UCU 2000-2008 (being national AUT President 2005/06 and Joint President of UCU 2006/07), he returned to ASMCF Exec as Hon Treasurer in 2007 and then Hon Secretary 2008-2014. He researches political communication, Occupied France and its legacy, and contemporary LGBTIQ activism in Britain and France. A current member of the Board of Education Support, he was Chair of Directors of Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution (2013-2019) and currently co-convenes its French Civilisation and Culture Group.

Fraser McQueen is a lecturer in French Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol, having previously held positions at the Universities of Stirling and Edinburgh. His research focuses on Islamophobia and community in contemporary French cultural production; current areas of interest include the cultural production of the far right and the mainstreaming of far-right conspiracy theories. He joined the ASMCF committee as an ordinary member in 2023.

Dr. Jamie Steele is currently Senior Lecturer in Film & Screen Studies at Bath Spa University. Jamie’s research is primarily concerned with both French-language Belgian cinema and French cinema. His first monograph, Francophone Belgian Cinema, was published in 2019 as part of Edinburgh University Press’ Traditions in World Cinema series. Jamie has published journal articles and book chapters on a range of topics, such as national/ transnational cinema, Francophone Belgian film clusters, hubs and policy, François Ozon’s Dans la maison, and – more recently – populism in French cinema (forthcoming). He is currently working on an edited collection, analysing the films of the Dardenne brothers.

Jordan McCullough is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland, working on the European Research Council-funded project ‘Assisted Dying in European Writing and Visual Culture: Reciprocal Interactions between Law, Medicine, and the Arts since 2000’. He was previously an early career researcher on the British Academy-funded Modern Languages Outreach and Engagement (MLOE) project, which sought to engage early career academics in research-driven outreach with primary and post-primary schools. He is also a Professional Associate with the Northern Ireland Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (NICILT) and has worked on a number of initiatives aimed at Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 language learners. He joined the ASMCF committee, as Outreach Officer, in 2022.

Helen is currently based at Queen's University Belfast. She was awarded her PhD in 2021 at QUB, with a thesis which examines the way in which slavery is represented through the use of religious imagery and narrative in nineteenth-century French novels and novellas, exploring how this reflects the involvement in the slave trade of various religious traditions from around the Atlantic Triangle, and teaches more broadly on the Caribbean and legacies of slavery. She has taught at both QUB and University of Glasgow. She joined the committee as a PG representative in 2019, and rejoined the committee as Web Officer in 2021.

Julia Ribeiro Thomaz obtained her PhD in French Language and Literature from Université Paris Nanterre and History from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. She is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection between History, Literature, Anthropology and the Digital Humanities. Her research interests are the poetry of the First World War, literary representations of armed conflict, and computational analysis of French poetry. She joined the ASMCF in 2022 as Conference Support Officer.

Ry Montgomery is a PhD candidate in French at the University of Cambridge. Their PhD research investigates contemporary cinematic representations of trans* identities in relation to French republican universalism. They are also interested in queer practices of archiving and mapping, as well as questions of spatiality and memory in the films of Lionel Soukaz. Ry joined the committee in 2023 as a Postgraduate Representative, and became an Ordinary Member in 2025. 

Cécile Guigui is a PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London. Her doctoral research explores the photographic practices of Algerian Jews during the French colonial period. Her research interests include French colonial history and the visual culture of Jewish communities within the French empire. Cécile joined the ASMCF as Postgraduate Representative in 2022.

Oliver Davis, Executive Editor of Modern & Contemporary France, is Professor of French Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick. He joined the committee in 2020. 

Elizabeth Benjamin is Assistant Professor of Memory Studies at the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities, Coventry University. Her work focuses on French and Francophone memorial culture in the modern and contemporary period. She has been involved with the ASMCF since 2018.