Amy is a specialist in Francophone autobiographies of exile and trauma. She is author of Hoarding Memory: Covering the Wounds of the Algerian War (U of Nebraska P, 2020), Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noirs, Identity and Exile (U of Nebraska P, 2015), and A la recherche d'un emploi: Business French in a Communicative Context (Hackett, 2017). She has co-edited several volumes including Places of Traumatic Memory - a Global Context (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), The Unspeakable: Representations of Trauma in Francophone Literature and Art (2013), and Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film and Comic Art in French Autobiography (U of Nebraska P, 2011). She is currently working on her new project, Terrorism Testimony: French Narratives of Survival.
Beth (she/elle) is Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies. Her research focuses broadly on francophone literature and visual cultures (20th-21st centuries); gender studies; global feminisms; and decolonial and transnational theory.
Her first book, Unfixing the Self in Contemporary Women's Phototexts of the Francophone World (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press) studies works of experimental autobiography in French – including autofiction, biofiction, autotheory – that include photographs alongside text. This monograph explores the ways that the combination of photography and autobiographical text disrupts fixed modes of understanding identity and experience by challenging hegemonic narratives about the self.
Her current research focuses on contemporary narratives of sexual and gender violence in world literature. This research investigates the ways that literature can offer unique modes of conceptualising sexual and gender violence, thus offering alternative discourses to those found in judicial, medical, and psychoanalytic contexts. She is also working on two edited volumes: The Heirs of Annie Ernaux with Alexandra Pugh and Questioning Republican Feminism: Intersectional, Transnational, and Decolonial Perspectives with Josephine Goldman and Sophie Tallis.
Beth is Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Treasurer for the Australian Society of French Studies, and Secretary for Women in French: Australia. She is on the editorial board of the book series Annie Ernaux International Studies (De Gruyter Brill) and is the proud co-founder and co-producer of the podcast Positionalities (with Josephine Goldman and Pooja Booluck-Miller). She is also Peer Group Leader for the WiF Mentorship Cluster ‘I’m Writing a Monograph.’
Anne Adele Levitsky is a scholar and performer of medieval vernacular song, in particular troubadour lyric poetry, and its connections to the larger cultural milieu of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. She is a graduate of Stanford University and earned her PhD in Historical Musicology from Columbia University in May 2018. At present, she is Lecturer in Music at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and has taught previously at Columbia, Dixie State University, and Stony Brook University. As an academic, she is interested in medieval vernacular song, poetry, and narrative literature, and her monograph The Natural World of Troubadour Song: Materiality, Craft, Philosophy is under contract with Liverpool University Press for their series Exeter Studies in Medieval Culture. It reads troubadour lyric poetry in the context of philosophical, theological, and medical writings available in the twelfth century, and uses this analytical frame to employ new methods for the analysis of medieval monophonic song. Her work also appears in Mediaevalia, Current Musicology, The Medieval Review, and in the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Music (in a chapter co-authored with Susan Boynton). Dr. Levitsky is also interested in the presence and role of medievalisms in popular music, especially in heavy metal.
She supplements this academic interest in vernacular song with an active performance career, and has studied and performed lyric poetry with the Narbonne-based Troubadours Art Ensemble, and recorded troubadour and trouvère songs both with the group and as a soloist. Dr. Levitsky performs regularly in the Brisbane area with The Australian Voices. In addition, she performs with ensemble Fractio Modi (of which she is a founding member). Past performances include a June 2013 performance with the Rolling Stones in Washington, DC, tours to Germany with NYC-based chamber ensemble GHOSTLIGHT Chorus, and concerts of monophony and polyphony from the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries on Columbia's Music at St. Paul's concert series. Dr. Levitsky is also the founding director of the UQ School of Music's Early Music Ensemble.
