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Alexandra Pugh

Alexandra Pugh

LSE Fellow

LSE100

Email
A.Pugh@lse.ac.uk
Room No
KSW.3.08
Office Hours
Tuesdays at 10:30-11:30, KSW 3.08 (Visit Student Hub to book a slot)
Connect with me

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Languages
French
Key Expertise
Gender studies, contemporary French feminism, queer-feminist theory

About me

Alexandra Pugh is an interdisciplinary researcher working in the fields of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and French Studies. She completed her PhD at King’s College London under the supervision of Professor Siobhán McIlvanney and Dr Ros Murray, funded by the AHRC London Arts & Humanities Partnership. In her PhD thesis, she draws on feminist theory, queer theory, and cultural studies to assess the ‘queer-feminist aesthetics’ of the contemporary French writer and filmmaker, Virginie Despentes. Her work has been published in Paragraph, College Literature, Public Books, and elsewhere.

Alexandra has taught literature, film, critical theory, French language, and digital humanities modules to undergraduate and master’s students at King’s College London. In 2022, she undertook a three-month AHRC-funded research placement at the Gender Studies institute at Sorbonne Université in Paris. Prior to her PhD, she completed an MSt in Women’s Studies and a BA in History and Modern Languages (French) at the University of Oxford. She currently sits on the committee of Women in French UK-Ireland.

Expertise Details

Gender Studies; contemporary French feminism; queer theory; feminist theory; French Studies; Film Studies; literature

Conferences

‘Can You Feel It? Abortion and Sensation in L’Événement (2021)’, Women in French UK-Ireland Biennial Conference (May 2023). 

‘Boundary Issues: The Body and the Nation in the Work of Virginie Despentes’, Women in French Australia Seminar Series: Bodies, Borders and Boundaries (January 2023).

‘Le féminisme et les études littéraires entre la France et le Royaume-Uni’, l’Atelier doctoral de l’Initiative Genre, Sorbonne Université (December 2022). 

‘“À la charnière, entre l’homme et l’animal”: the Role of the Nonhuman in the Work of Virginie Despentes’, Society for French Studies Annual Conference (June 2022).

‘Centring Marginalised Bodies and Voices: The Pro-Sex Community in Virginie Despentes’s Documentary Film Mutantes (2009)’, 10th International Women in French Conference (May 2022).

‘The Heteronormative Effects of the Pandemic and Feminist Scholarship as Solace’, Feminism(s) in the Age of Covid-19 and Beyond: An Interdisciplinary Conference (September 2021). 

‘The Negotiation of Hope and Failure in Vernon Subutex by Virginie Despentes’, Society for French Studies Postgraduate Conference (May 2021).

‘Toujours dérangeante ? The Disruption of National Boundaries in the Work of Virginie Despentes’, Women in French UK-Ireland Biennial Conference (May 2021).

‘Tracing the Figure of Roland Barthes in The Argonauts: A “many-gendered mother” of Maggie Nelson’s Heart’, Body, Space, Voice: The Feminist Thinking Graduate Conference, University of Oxford (March 2021).

Publications

‘Disruption and Eruption: Terrorist Violence in the Work of Virginie Despentes’ in Disruptive Discourses in Francophone Women’s Writing, edited by Julie Rodgers, Ciara Gorman and Polly Galis (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, forthcoming 2024). 

‘Unbecoming Woman: The Shadow Feminism of King Kong théorie by Virginie Despentes’, Paragraph 46:2 (2023), 212–25.

‘Tracing the Figure of Roland Barthes in The Argonauts: A “many-gendered mother” of Maggie Nelson’s Heart’, College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 50:4 (2023), 547–71.

‘The Promise of Utopia in Vernon Subutex by Virginie Despentes’, French Studies Bulletin 43:163 (2022), 3–8. 

‘Virginie Despentes’, The Literary Encyclopedia (2022).

‘Virginie Despentes: King Kong théorie’, The Literary Encyclopedia (2022).

‘Can You Feel It? Happening and Sensory Cinema’, Public Books (2022).

‘Border Crossings’ (a review of King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes and An Apartment on Uranus by Paul B. Preciado), Oxford Review of Books (2021).

‘Scrambling Sex and Gender with Rachilde: Towards a Reading of Monsieur Vénus as “proto-queer”’, Connections: A Journal of Language, Media and Culture 1 (2020), 21–30. 

Awards

AHRC London Arts & Humanities Partnership Doctoral Research Studentship (2020–23)

Hildegard Prize, St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford (2019)

Kathleen Chesney Prize for Modern Languages, St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford (2018)

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