Teaching & workshops

I joined the French faculty at Bristol Translates summer school at the University of Bristol, July 2022, to devise and lead three days of intensive translation workshops with 12 students, exploring a recently-completed literary text, and selected pieces from my recent commercial translation practice (travel guides, a contemporary art journal, elevator pitches for works of French fiction).

“Our tutor in French Group 3 (Louise Rogers Lalaurie) was brilliant, really inspiring, friendly and encouraging, and great at getting everyone involved.”

(Particopant feedback from Bristol Translates 2022).

As part of a series of post-graduate workshops at ULIP in 2010/11, exploring the French extrême littéraire, I led a close reading and discussion of the work of self-styled Sadeian Gabrielle Wittkop. Proceedings of ULIP’s post-graduate conference on the topic are published by OUP.

Research

My research interests include art history and translation studies – close reading, formal analysis, the interaction of text and image, and the interpretation and translation of hybrid visual and literary texts. My monograph Matisse: The Books, a study of the artist’s eight major livres d’artiste (1932-50), is published by Thames & Hudson Ltd and the University of Chicago Press (September 2020).

I completed an MPhil. at the University of London Institute in Paris in January 2013. Examined by Professor Susan Bassnett (Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Warwick) and Professor Eric Robertson of Royal Holloway, University of London, the thesis looks at the translation challenges posed by livres d’artiste – in particular Matisse’s Jazz and his Florilège des Amours de Ronsard. How does Matisse’s pictorial and decorative setting influence the translator’s choices in a new verse translation of poems by the 16th-century French poet Pierre de Ronsard?

‘…a highly original and intellectually rigorous piece of research that contains numerous valuable insights.’

Professors Susan Bassnett and Eric Robertson, June 2012.

Journal publications

‘Dancing on ropes with fettered legs: the rewards and challenges of translating livres d’artistes’, in Norwich Papers, Vol. 21, University of East Anglia, November 2013.

Conference papers

‘Dancing on ropes with fettered legs: the rewards and challenges of translating livres d’artistes’, at It Gives Us the Other: Poetry and Translation, a conference and workday at the University of Nottingham, March 2011.

Academic translation

My academic translations include articles for a contributed volume published by the Institut Français de la Mode (fashion & feminism, fashion & diversity…), and abstracts, journal articles and conference texts for France’s Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art (INHA). Also:

• Denis Ribouillault, ‘Regurgitating Nature: On a celebrated anecdote by Karel van Mander about Pieter Bruegel the Elder’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, January 2016.
• Over ten years, for La Verrière, the Brussels art space of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, under curator Guillaume Désanges (now President of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris), I translated thirty scholarly texts on modern and contemporary artists for three series of themed exhibitions presented at the gallery.
• Patrick Chamoiseau, a critical study by Samia Khassab-Charfi, Institut Français/Gallimard, 2012. The study features an anthology of Chamoiseau’s writing, including my own translations of extracts from works hitherto unpublished in English.