Kate Hodgson

Dr Kate Hodgson is lecturer in the Department of French at University College Cork and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures. She is a graduate of the University of Cambridge and the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord. She completed her AHRC-funded PhD in 2009 at University College London under the supervision of Professor Celia Britton. Before joining UCC in 2016, she was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Liverpool. She has also worked as a researcher on the EURESCL project (Slave Trades, Slavery, Abolition and their Legacies in European Histories and Identities), funded by the EU Seventh Framework programme, at the University of Hull and the CNRS in Paris. 

Kate Hodgson co-convenes a research cluster in the Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures at UCC on memory, commemoration and the uses of the past. She is author and co-editor of a recent volume with Routledge, Memory, Mobility & Material Culture (2022). Her research focuses on the Haitian revolution and its afterlives, the abolition of slavery and postcolonial memory.  She is interested in issues of historical memory, commemoration, cultural heritage (including oral and material cultures) and the uses of the past in the present. A specialist in the area of the Francophone Caribbean, particularly Haiti, she has wider research interests across the French Atlantic world, particularly in the areas of migration and diaspora.

- Francophone postcolonial literature and culture

- Haiti and the wider Francophone Caribbean

- Slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world

- Legacies of the Haitian revolution

- Memory studies, cultural heritage and the uses of the past in the present

- Mobility and material culture

- Archives and the postcolony

At UCC I teach modules in Contemporary Caribbean Studies (FR4310), Francophone Travel Writing (FR2313), and Society and Politics in the Francophone world (FR4702). I also teach on a wide range of other modules within the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. I am the coordinator within the Department of French for the BSc International Business with Languages programme. I coordinate first and second year specialist modules FR1901 Understanding France for International Business and FR2901 French Society and Institutions for students of this programme. I teach on the MA in Migration, Mobility and Culture and the MA in Translation Studies. I would be happy to supervise students at Master's and doctoral level working in any area relevant to my interests, and particularly on memory and heritage in the Caribbean and in the wider French-speaking world.