A Fellow of Corpus since 1995, Professor Emma Wilson FBA is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts and a Lecturer in Modern and Medieval Languages. Her research focuses on modern French literature, contemporary French cinema, and gender and sexuality. In addition to her academic work in the arts and visual humanities, she is highly regarded at Corpus for her commitment to teaching, supervising and tutoring students for nearly 30 years. Last year she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

Her election to the British Academy marks Emma’s contribution to the fields of modern and contemporary French cinema, gender and sexuality, the visual arts, writing by women and contemporary Italian cinema. She says, “I am proud to have been elected in a year when, in the words of Professor Julia Black, ‘the tide is finally turning for women in academia’. In addition to reflecting the substance and volume of my research outputs, I believe my election recognises my role in supervising and mentoring research students who have gone on to be successful in securing posts in the fields of French Studies and Film Studies.”

Female footsteps

Emma was an undergraduate at Newnham, matriculating in 1985. She says, “It was important to me to go to a college associated with the history of women’s achievement in Cambridge. I was a reader of Sylvia Plath. I was inspired by Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own. I loved her image of a women’s college, and of the gardens of Newnham, ‘wild and open, and in the long grass, sprinkled and carelessly flung, were daffodils and bluebells’.”

Emma came to Cambridge just two years after Corpus accepted female undergraduates and she has always valued the opportunity to be taught by gifted women academics. When she took up her Fellowship at Corpus, she worked with Professor Ann Hallam Caesar, an Italianist and specialist in Italian women’s writing, and the history of female literacy in Italy.

As a girl growing up in a small flat surrounded by books with her mother, the author Jacqueline Wilson, Emma developed a desire to express herself through writing at a young age. She says, “My mother is an Honorary Fellow of the College, something of which both she and I are very proud (she, a woman who started writing at a table in our living room, with, at that time, neither money nor a room of her own)”.

When it comes to her research, Emma is passionate. Her interest in film in the French-speaking world was nurtured by cinema-going in Paris and also by working as an usher at the Cambridge Arts Cinema when she was a postgraduate student. She has published extensively on cinema. Her most recent book is Céline Sciamma: Portraits.

“I love my subject. I feel empowered to pursue the research topics that interest me the most.” She is pleased that film, particularly European cinema, has been introduced into a growing number of courses in the Modern and Medieval Languages (MML) Faculty because it gives students the chance to engage closely with visual material.

Professor JD Rhodes, Professor of Film Studies and Visual Culture in the MML Faculty, describes the impact of Emma’s work, “Emma Wilson has exerted an enormous influence on the way that we think about contemporary cinema (especially, but by no means exclusively French cinema), women’s cinema, art cinema, and experimental moving image media. She has written exquisite single-author studies on figures like C ́eline Sciamma and Chantal Akerman, as well as field-defining thematic monographs on childhood and cinema, mortality and the moving image, and the reclining nude. Across all of these works, Emma’s interest in cinema’s representation of intimacy as well as the medium’s powerful ways of effecting intimate encounters is reciprocally embodied in her close attention to formal and textual detail. Her writing is itself a study in the intimacy that can exist between the writer and the work of art. To read her work is to watch a film anew, and with better eyes. As a teacher and supervisor, Emma’s influence is felt just as strongly. Her former supervisees hold prestigious positions at universities across the UK, as well as at Cambridge. Emma has not sought to create a school of thought, however. Rather she has exemplified a method of combining conceptual rigour and imagination with the thrill of discovering and describing the strangeness of the artwork.”

Of teaching, Emma says, “I love the opportunity to supervise people and find ways of enthusing them. I love the sense of possibility that comes from hearing someone’s ideas and responding to them. Academia can be a competitive, driven environment and everyone experiences doubts that can hold them back. At those points it can really help to have someone encouraging you to hold your nerve and believing in you. I think there’s a sense in which to be successful is to be able to help others to move forwards. If some students look at me and think I can be an academic and I don’t have to fit the mould and I can do more creative work or I can make these choices then I’m thrilled.”

In the years 2010-12, Emma participated in the Equality and Diversity project ‘The Meaning of Success’ and was a member of the Senior Gender Equality Network (2012-14). She has focused on ensuring the diversity of the curriculum at undergraduate and graduate level, foregrounding gender perspectives and ensuring coverage of works by female, queer, and non-binary writers, artists, and filmmakers. She was shortlisted for a CUSU Student-Led Teaching Award for ‘Inclusive Teaching’ in 2017.

Emma is pleased to belong to a College with a growing female representation in the Fellowship, led by a female Senior Tutor, Dr Marina Frasca-Spada, and with a history of female benefaction and commitment to education, religion, learning and research. She is looking forward to the celebrations of Forty Years On • Women of Corpus.