Biography
Rebecca Courtier (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. Her project, funded by the AHRC Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership, considers ideas of cultural identity (sameness and difference) across the centuries, through comparison of portraits of marginal and/or migrant figures in medieval and modern-day French literature, as well as through application of modern critical theory to the European Middle Ages.
Research
Bex's research will compare portraits of culturally marginal figures in medieval French literature with those of migrants in present-day French literature, emphasising their social and geographical movements. It will set up an interdisciplinary dialogue between medieval narratives that depict the liminal status of the ‘inside-outsider’—the internally subjugated, or soon-to-be subjugated (French) individual, whether by his/her fictional culture or manuscript narrator—and emergent migrant literature, which comments on the current Syrian and Iraqi migration crises from French perspectives.
