Celebrating International Women's Day: Fellows reflect on their first year at Downing
To mark International Women's Day, five of our newest Fellows reflect on their first year as part of the College community and give an insight into their work over the past few months.
Dr Liesbeth Francois
I became a fellow at Downing College last February and have very much enjoyed the year. The College’s welcoming atmosphere and the diversity of academic and personal backgrounds of my colleagues make it an ideal environment to work in. As a teaching associate at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, I dedicate most of my time to lecturing and supervising on the Latin American culture papers in the MML Tripos – mainly literature and cinema, but also visual arts and translation – and the postgraduate programmes in European, Latin American Studies and Comparative Literatures and Cultures and Latin American studies. I have also taken up the role of Director of Studies for Part II MML at Downing, which is a nice way to get to know the students better. I am also gaining further insight into the workings of the College as a member of several committees and working groups, and I look forward to further endorsing and contributing to events for modern languages and creative arts.
In terms of research, I have been working on the co-edition of a volume entitled Re-imagining Class: Intersectional Perspectives on Class Identity and Precarity in Contemporary Culture with a former colleague. The book will be published in April, and it focuses on the many ways in which artistic products and practices from a wide range of different linguistic and cultural contexts help us re-engage with the category of class, which has all too often been discredited as a relic from the past. In line with my expertise in urban culture, a chapter I wrote for the Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies came out last year, I am currently writing an invited chapter for an edited volume on urban undergrounds worldwide and collaborating with a colleague from the Spanish and Portuguese section to organise an international symposium on urban space and improvisation in Latin American culture.
I am exploring new terrain with a project that goes by the provisional title of “Geological Collectivities”. It will focus on Latin American works of literature, cinema, and visual art that draw on geology in their aesthetic procedures in order to examine modes of collectivity and to explore the potential for the creation of a politics of the common. I have presented and will be presenting my work at conferences in Latin American studies, and will deliver a series of lectures and seminars on this topic during my visit as an invited researcher this summer at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago de Chile.
Dr Alice Sowton
I have greatly enjoyed getting to know the students, staff and fellows. I have immensely enjoyed joining the fantastic Biological Natural Sciences Director of Studies team. I have spent my time supervising the first and second-year Natural Sciences students in the physiology courses. It has been great to see the Downing students flourish in their studies as the year progresses. At the end of Michaelmas, I joined the Biological Natural Sciences interview team for the admissions season, and after a tiring four days, we are excited to welcome next year's cohort of students.
Outside of college, I have been continuing my research in the Mitochondrial Biology Unit where I research problems that mitochondria have generating energy with different diseases. My specific research involves a hereditary condition called Citrin Deficiency, which mainly affects the liver, and have been working with collaborators on new cell models of condition to have greater understanding of what goes wrong in this disease and what possible ways we can treat it. I have also been finalising two papers from my PhD work, on changes in energy metabolism in diabetes and obesity, which I will be submitting for publication in the coming months.
Dr Stefania Fiorentino
My experience as a resident fellow in this welcoming and enriching community has so far been immensely gratifying. I have familiarized myself with college committees and the governing body and engaged in various social events with students and alumni.
On the research front, I recently finalised two years of work with the publication of a two-part special issue on “Left-behind places and what can be done about them” in the Cambridge Journal of Regions Economy and Society. Co-edited with eminent scholars in economic geography, the issue scrutinizes regional inequalities across various countries. As we explain in the introduction of the Part-one issue, there are different types of "left-behind places," where processes such as de-industrialization, economic shifts, policy failures, environmental threats, and social changes have converged to create multiple crises. In a separate empirical article within the special issue, I examine coastal towns in the UK, proposing avenues for their future regeneration. Part two, forthcoming, focuses on policy measures to address these inequalities for more sustainable regional futures.
I am particularly proud to have developed and gained approval for delivery in 2024/25 of a brand-new module for the MPhil in Planning Growth and Urban Regeneration, titled "Urban Regeneration and Regional Transformation." I have designed the module from scratch based on my research interests and expertise; it represents a significant step in formalizing the teaching of "urban regeneration" in Cambridge for the first time.
Dr Rebecca Freund
I have had a very busy but fulfilling time. I have been supervising all the Downing first years in Constitutional Law, and almost all of the Downing second-year cohort in the optional Human Rights Law course. It had been a great pleasure to witness the students’ progress, and am particularly happy with how the first years are taking to their legal studies. The end of Michaelmas term brought the busy admissions interview season: I interviewed on 4 of the 5 days and saw many candidates. Selecting was very difficult but we are excited for next year's first-year cohort. I spent the first part of the Christmas break writing a chapter for an upcoming volume to be published with Oxford University Press called Comparing Covid Laws. My chapter focuses on opportunistic use of protest restrictions around the world. I am looking forward to moving on to work on securing a book proposal for my PhD research on detention without trial in the British Empire in the coming months.
Dr Rachel Coombes
My first year at Downing has been very fruitful so far, and I have been made to feel very welcome in my new home – it’s a pleasure to be a part of such a warm community! I have been working on my first monograph, which focuses on the French painter Maurice Denis (1870-1943). I have also made the final touches to an article “The Sounding Body in the Musical Illustrations of Maurice Denis and Pierre Bonnard” for the journal Music in Art (which has come out in print this week), and written an article on the twentieth-century Gregorian chant revival within a little-known community in Paris’s Saint-Germain-en-Laye (currently under review with French History). I’m now embarking on a chapter for a forthcoming volume The Politics of Intermedial Modernism(s) on interconnections between Denis and the dancer Isadora Duncan.
In January, I was involved in the most exciting project of my academic career to date, co-convening the conference Gesture: A Three-Day Investigation at St John’s College, Oxford. The event brought together art historians, artists, musicologists, dance theorists, and other scholars, to discuss how “the gestural” lies at the heart of creative expression. We have had interest from publishers in a collected volume of essays, so I am beginning work on that now with my co-convenors. I am also musing on possibilities for a follow-up event closer to home in Downing … watch this space.
Other projects in the pipeline include a journal special issue (with Dr Francesca Berry from the University of Birmingham) on “intermediality” as it relates to the work of a group of French fin-de-siècle painters known as Les Nabis. Meanwhile, the ECR Nineteenth Century French Art Network, which I co-founded in January 2022, continues to grow – we have a particularly exciting event coming up in May to coincide with the landmark exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris 1874: Inventing impressionism, celebrating 150 years since the first Impressionist exhibition.
Published 8 March 2024