Dr. Ashley Harris
Assistant Professor in French, French

Dr Ashley Harris is Assistant Professor in the French department in Trinity College Dublin which she joined in 2023. She is currently spearheading the new French for Teachers Upskilling postgraduate programme at TCD, after having secured national funding from the Department of Education and Youth. Prior to this, she held full-time posts in Queen's University Belfast (3 years), University of Surrey (1 year) and University of Stirling (1 year). Between her PhD and coming back into academia, she worked as Strategic Advisor in the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office. Ashley's research focuses primarily on twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and Francophone culture, politics, and society. She is particularly interested in sociocultural approaches and questions of equality, representation and identity in contemporary France. Harris has published various articles on the concept of the écrivain.e médiatique, using Virginie Despentes, Michel Houellebecq and Frédéric Beigbeder as case studies. She has a forthcoming monograph on these figures, which analyses the influence of mass media and mediatisation on contemporary French authorship and the gendered nature of literary fame in France today. Previously, Ashley was Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the AHRC Remembering Empire impact programme which sought to help the public explore questions of memory and identity through representations of French Algeria, the war for independence and the subsequent migration of the pieds-noirs. Her recent research studies mainstream and grassroots representations of the banlieues, on which she has published several articles and is co-editing a special issue.