This one day course will consider Celine Sciamma’s importance as a filmmaker by exploring in some detail a number of her key films from her debut Water Lillies (2007), to films such as Tomboy (2011), her breakthrough Girlhood (2014), and her more recent popular successes Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) and Petite Maman (2021).

Dr Karine Chevalier is a lecturer in Film studies. She is also a filmmaker. Her main research interests lie in the field of Transnational Cinema, French and Francophone Cinema, Visual Arts and Aesthetics, Postcolonial Studies, Intermediality, as well as Screenwriting and Filmmaking, with a specific focus on Violence and Resilience, Creative Voices, Digital Storytelling and Multiscreens, Alterities and Minorities, Moving (auto)Portraits and Masks.

This in-college literature course explores the extraordinarily diverse world of writing about motherhood. We’ll look at literary texts that have firmly rebuked any notions of motherhood as ‘merely’ domestic, and have instead made it the subject of serious literary writing, have explored major themes such as the body, trauma, gender, queerness, race and creativity, and have written diverse truths about the realities of motherhood. You’ll leave this course with an understanding of classic texts about motherhood by authors such as Adrienne Rich as well as more recent texts by authors such as Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson and Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀.