Dr Christie Margrave

(she/her)

MA (Hons), MLitt, PhD (St And) PGCE FHEA PG CERT

Publication

• Date
• Type

Research

My research focuses on Francophone women’s writing and marginalized voices. Currently, I research narrative reproductive medicine, lived experiences of birthing, and representations of non-normative families in 21st-century women’s life-writing. I am particularly interested in narratives of and by Solo Mothers By Choice (SMBC), and am working on a project entitled ‘Pushing for Change: The Importance of Narrative Medicine in Identifying Policy and Healthcare Concerns of Solo Mothers By Choice’. This project investigates and compares the situations of SMBC in France, the UK and Australia, looking at how such mothers are imagined and (self-)defined in contemporary society. It examines how SMBC narrate the challenges they face regarding policies, healthcare, and social stigma, and expands current scholarship on literary representations of motherhood and non-normative families. It looks at the meaning-making process of telling one’s story, providing information about how women make sense of reproductive medicine, how voicing their stories increases their agency, and how SMBCs telling their story can be transformative for both selves and society. I have published an autoethnographic article on Solo Motherhood By Choice journeys between the UK and Australia with the Donor Conception Network journal Perspectives, and have been invited to record a podcast episode for No End In Sight on the topics of women’s health and IVF.

My past research focuses on late 18^th and early 19th-century women’s writing, ecocriticism, and (post)colonial fiction. My first monograph, Writing the Landscape: Exposing Nature in French Women’s Fiction 1789-1815, was published with Legenda in 2019. It explores the writing of Mmes Cottin, de Genlis, de Krüdener, de Souza and de Staël, their representation of natural landscape, and their influence on French literary Romanticism. I have also published articles on 18^th- and 19^th-century French women’s writing in Essays in French Literature and Culture, Women’s Writing, and The Palgrave Handbook of Transnational Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century. My research looking at French (post)colonial literature through an environmental lens also examines marginalised voices, such as those of women writers and indigenous writers from colonised islands. In this field, I have published articles on environment and identity in 19^th-century French Caribbean Novels (Dix-Neuf); and Malagasy ecopoetics (Journal of Romance Studies).

Teaching

Current Teaching

National and Global Perspectives on France

Ex-Advanced Level French Language

High-Level Proficiency in French Language

Past Teaching at Cardiff University

Narrating and Visualising French Colonialism

Year 1 French Language

Translation as a Profession

Final Year Dissertation - Translation in English/Welsh

Introduction to Translation Theory

Introduction to Translation Methods

Principles of Translation Theory

Biography

I joined Cardiff University's School of Modern Languages on a permanent basis in 2024. However, I first came to Cardiff School of Modern Languages in 2015 as a Lecturer in French on a temporary contract. I then moved to Aberystwyth University in 2018, and to the Australian National University in 2019. The pandemic and its border closures brought me back to the UK, where I worked as a Lecturer in French and Interpreting at the University of East Anglia from 2021-2024, and where I also first began work in the Medical Humanities. I organised workshops for student interpreters (working in French, Spanish and Japanese) with junior doctors working at the Norfolk and Norwich hospital. 

I completed my MA (2007), MLitt (2009) and PhD (2015) at the University of St Andrews. I took a leave of absence during my PhD studies to spend two years teaching at the Sorbonne - Paris IV between 2010 and 2012. Whilst completing the final semester of my PhD and awaiting my viva, I worked as a Lecturer in French and Latin at Bangor University in North Wales.

Supervisions

I welcome applications from PhD students interested in the areas of:

• Medical Humanities and French Literature
• French Women's Writing
• Narrative Reproductive Medicine
• Francophone Island literature
• Environmental Humanities and French Literature
• French 18th-century Literature
• French 19th-century Literature