Final Report Summary - QAF (Queer-Arab-French: Sexuality, Islam and Citizenship in France)
During the Marie Curie Fellowship, I also benefited from the intellectual exchange with colleagues at Nottingham Trent University who helped me sharpen my focus and to refine my understanding of the specific ways in which cultural discourses and social practices in France inform sexual identity, citizenship and Maghrebi identities. At the same time, I shared my expertise with NTU staff and students by attending and participating in on-campus events, including scholarly conferences, guess lectures, and the occasional faculty reading group where we met to discuss scholarship related to cultural difference, language issues, and human rights. I also developed and widened significantly my ties with colleagues both at NTU and further afield from many major universities in the U.K (see below the list of presentations, round table discussions, and external reviews). Throughout the year at NTU, I occasionally organized outreach activities that helped with the transfer of knowledge to colleagues, students, and local community members. This included the UK debut of a recent Moroccan/French film and an engaging question & answer session with its director, Mehdi Ben Attia, at the Broadway Cinema in Nottingham. I also invited a guest lecturer from the US in a related field so that colleagues and students at NTU could see how scholars from other contexts discuss and research these topics. Finally, two NTU colleagues (Dr. Martin O’Shaughnessy and Dr. Gill Allwood) serve as editors of Modern & Contemporary France, a key UK-based journal in the field of French studies, while I serve as co-editor-in-chief of Contemporary French Civilization, which is a key US-based journal in the field of French studies. The Editors from the respective journals worked together during the year to recruit authors and review manuscripts, and to discuss future directions of and collaborations between journals. The three editors (O’Shaughnessy, Allwood, and Provencher) also become the co-editors of a new book series, Studies in Modern & Contemporary France, which was commissioned by Liverpool University Press and launched during the Marie Curie Fellowship. The three editors will continue to work together and collaborate in this capacity for years to come.