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07 June 2021

Dr Benjamin Dalton awarded second place in the Society for French Studies Malcolm Bowie prize

The French department is delighted to announce that Dr Benjamin Dalton, a former PhD student in the department, has been awarded second place for this year's Society for French Studies Malcolm Bowie prize for the most outstanding article published by an early career researcher during the preceding calendar year.

Ben dalton

Ben won second place for his article, ‘Forms of Freedoms: Marie Darrieussecq, Catherine Malabou, and the Plasticity of Science’, Dalhousie French Studies 115 (2020), 55-73. This is a considerable achievement given the wide international range, and the extremely high overall standard of the submissions.

Ben’s article in Dalhousie French Studies examines in particular representations of bodily plasticity in the work of the contemporary French author Marie Darrieussecq, exploring the depiction of a woman’s transformation into a pig in Pig Tales (1996) and processes of cloning in Our Life in the Forest (2017).

“I am really over the moon and excited to have been awarded second place in the Malcom Bowie prize. I truly believe in the plastic, transformative power of all life, and my goal in my research is to help contribute to exploring how encounters between philosophy (such as the brilliant work of Catherine Malabou), science, and art can help us discover more about, and find joy and peace in that plastic transformability! It was brilliant to write this article in the supportive and generous research environment of the French department at King’s College London, whilst working on my PhD under the supervision of Professor Patrick ffrench. My article is dedicated to my mother Rosie Dalton, who died in 2019, and who saw her final illness as a profound metamorphosis, looking at it and experiencing it with curiosity and wonder. All my thanks to the Society for French Studies for selecting this article – it means a lot to me and has energized me greatly in moving forward with this research.

Ben Dalton

 

(Aug 2022 - The Department of French is now the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures)

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Teaching Fellow in French, Sexuality and Gender, University of Birmingham

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