Contact & People
Got a question? Don’t hesitate to get in contact with us.
Details of the ASMCF Executive Committee can also be found here.
People of ASMCF

Chris Tinker
President
Chris Tinker

Chris Tinker is a Professor of French at the Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. His interests are in Media and Popular Music in France and Britain with particular focus on representations of generation/ageing, gender, nostalgia and charity. Chris is an active member of the ASMCF-affiliated French Media Research Group, co-organising with Hugh Dauncey (Newcastle) one-day conferences on Music and Media (FMRG18) and on Media, Memory & Nostalgia (FMRG22 & FMRG23). Chris is also currently a member of the Modern and Contemporary France Editorial Board and has co-edited themed issues of the journal on Representing Paris (with Alison Fell, 2000), on Youth Cultures in the Fifth Republic (with Wendy Michallat, 2007) and on Media, Memory & Nostalgia (with Hugh Dauncey, 2015). In 2014 Chris joined the ASMCF Executive Committee as Honorary Secretary.

Aude Campmas
Honorary Treasurer
Aude Campmas

I am a Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Southampton. My current research interests include the relation between science and literature, and the representation of ‘the monstrous family’ in Francophone literature. I joined the committee in 2014.

Jordan McCullough
Outreach Officer
Jordan McCullough

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.

Chris O'Neill
Web Officer
Chris O'Neill

Chris O’Neill was awarded his PhD in 2019 from the School of Languages and Social Sciences at Aston University in Birmingham. His PhD thesis examines newspaper cartooning and the mechanisms of press control and censorship under Vichy. Other research interests include the French political system, Bande Dessinée, caricature, war in comics, representations of political figures in comics and France in the inter-war period. Chris joined the ASMCF Committee as Web Officer in 2017 and is also on the committee of International Bande Dessinée Society.

Jamie Steele
Prizes Officer
Jamie Steele

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.

Fiona Barclay
Honorary Secretary
Fiona Barclay

Fiona Barclay is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Stirling. Her research interests lie in the postcolonial relationship between France and Algeria as it is represented in literature, film and media, and she has published extensively on issues of postcolonial memory, commemoration and haunting. She joined the Executive Committee in 2010 as co-organiser of the 2011 conference, and served as Membership Secretary from 2011 to 2016, when she became Honorary Secretary.

Helen McKelvey
Web Officer
Helen McKelvey

Helen is a Lecturer in French Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. She has recently completed her PhD there, 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. She joined the committee as a PG representative in 2019, and rejoined the committee as Web Officer in 2021.

Jan Windebank
Honorary Vice-President
Jan Windebank

Jan Windebank is Professor of French and European Society in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sheffield. She has published on a variety of topics concerning work, family, gender, social exclusion and social policy in France and in comparative European perspective in leading sociology, social policy, business and European studies journals and has published a number of books including Informal employment in the advanced economies (Routledge, with C.C. Williams) and Women and work in France and Britain (Macmillan, with A. Gregory). Jan currently co-edits the Journal of Contemporary European Studies and is co-organiser of the Centre for Gender Studies in Europe. Jan has been a member of ASMCF since commencing her PhD in 1985, sat on the Executive Committee in the early 90s and again since 2010, been a member of the Editorial Board of Modern and Contemporary France and organised two annual conferences in 1993 and 2006 in Sheffield. She has been President of the Association since 2013.

Maire Cross
Honorary Vice-President
Maire Cross

I joined the association as a postgraduate in the 1980s and by 1985 was a member of the committee, serving as membership secretary from 1986 to 1988. I served on the editorial board from 1995 to 2005, and with Sheila Perry co-organised the 1995 conference held in Newcastle upon Tyne, where we inaugurated the custom of having a ceilidh after the conference dinner. I served as president until 2013. My chapter, ‘Sartre in Middlesex, De Beauvoir in Oxford: The Contribution of the ASMCF to the Study of France’, in: Lane, P., & Worton, M, eds, French Studies in and for the Twentieth Century. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011, pp. 272-288, was the first published history of the association. Since 2005 I have been Professor of French and head of department at Newcastle University. As a trustee of the Society for the Study of French History I was then president until 2017.

Megan Ison
Membership Secretary
Megan Ison

Meg is an ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership-funded student at the University of Portsmouth in the first year of her doctoral studies. Meg holds an ESRC-funded MSc Social Research Methods from the University of Southampton and a BA French Studies from the University of Portsmouth. She spent her Erasmus third year abroad at Sciences Po Strasbourg, the city in which her passion for Alsace history, memory and heritage began. Her PhD project, supervised by Dr Natalya Vince, Professor Marion Demossier and Dr Joan Tumblety, researches the ‘forgotten history’ of the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane in Alsace and examines the commercial aspects of competitive memory and heritage.

Pallavi Joshi
Postgraduate Representative
Pallavi Joshi

Pallavi Joshi is a Chancellor’s International Scholar in French Studies at the University of Warwick. Her doctoral project, supervised by Dr. Mary Harrod and Dr. Douglas Morrey, adopts a multi-faceted theoretical approach to examine the burgeoning cinematic representations of lone-parent families in the French cinema of the current decade. She has been actively involved in university’s Student Staff Liaison Committee and was elected Chair of the PG SSLC in her second year of doctoral study. Before coming to Warwick, she completed a Master 2 in History and Social Sciences at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris. Her research in Paris was funded by the Charpak Scholarship of Excellence and the Université Sorbonne Paris Cité Scholarship for Masters Students. She was the topper for the MA in French Translation degree at the University of Pune. She has previously worked as a French language trainer and conference interpreter.

Steve Wharton
Honorary Vice-Secretary
Steve Wharton

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. Having served on the Executive 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 Occupied France and its legacy, contemporary LGBT activism in Britain and France, and political communication. He has served as Chair of Directors of Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution where he currently co-convenes its French Civilisation and Culture Group.

Oliver Davis
Editor of MCF
Oliver Davis

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. To find out more about Oliver’s research, visit his institutional page: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/academic/od/

Sophie Dubillot
Postgraduate Representative
Sophie Dubillot

Sophie Dubillot is an AHRC-funded doctoral student in the second year of her collaborative PhD Modern French History with the Open University and Cambridge University Library (OOC DTP). Her doctoral project focuses on the different forms, purposes, limits and evolution of war humour in French publications during the post-war period from the Normandy landings in June 1944 until the establishment of the French Fourth Republic in October 1946, a period that has never been studied from this perspective. This PhD builds upon her previous research while building the Chadwyck-Healey Liberation Collection, the main corpus for her thesis, and extends her collaboration with the University Library at Cambridge. Before undertaking PhD study, Sophie worked as a Bibliographical Researcher, specialising in French books published in the post Second World War.