This is the website (under development) of Dr Angela Ryan, French Studies academic, psychologist, painter, writer and musician.

Dr Angela Ryan BA (UCD) M es L & D es L (Bordeaux) D es L (Sorbonne) MA (Applied Psychology-Coaching) (UCC) Agrégée de l'Université angelamtryan@gmail.com 

Biography

Of Irish and French nationality, Angela Ryan is a graduate in English and French of UCD, where she was an Entrance Scholar and French Prize winner. After research for a Maîtrise ès-lettres on André Breton and a Doctorat ès-lettres on literature and psychoanalysis in France, working in the Université de Bordeaux III under Professor Claude-Gilbert Dubois, she obtained 8th place in France in the post-doctoral competitive Agrégation d’anglais in 1983. Her second thesis on Heroism Studies, directed by Professor Antoine Compagnon, was defended at the Sorbonne in 2011. She was appointed to the Université  de Rennes II in 1983, and in 1988 to UCC, where she has been responsible for introducing and developing specialist courses on French cultural studies, theory and thought, women's studies, translation and interpreting.

She designed and set up the MA (Translation and Interpreting Studies) in 1991, and re-started it in 2008 (after a UCC-imposed gap) in response to the recession-caused need for increasingly work- and world-ready graduates. In 2011 she chaired the Working Party tasked with extending this MA to other languages in UCC. The MA in Translation and Interpreting Studies (French) is the only MA other than DCU offering training in simultaneous and consecutive interpreting. This programme has over 60 graduates for French (whether solo or as one of a language pair), generating for UCC some 300,000 euro in fees, and corresponding FTEs and so is one of UCC Arts’ most successful Masters for recruitment, and completed dissertations. She also publishes and directs research on traductology.

She supervises Doctoral research in this field, as in heroism studies.

She developed the French Department Media Room, and organised the School of Languages and Literature's first Conference on Language Teaching Methodology, in 1992: she edited selective proceedings in 1994.

In 2000 she was invited by the Irish Translators' and Interpreters' Association / Cumann Aistritheoiri agus Teangairi na hEireann (of which she is past Chairperson) to give the annual St Jerome lecture on International Translation Day, 29th September: “Translation as Cultural Memory: Visions and Revisions of Identity in Early Irish and Contemporary Anglo-Irish Literature”.

In 2001 she was invited to lecture on Jean Renoir's cinema in Harvard University's Department of Romance Languages and Literature, and was awarded, jointly with Dr Martin Munro (University of the West Indies) the French Embassy's Translation Prize Prix de l'Ambassade.

She is a Founder Member and Executive Member of the Paris-based Societé française de mémétique, founded in 2000, which brings together scientists and cultural theorists to reflect on issues of cognition and cultural transfer in the new interdisciplinary area of memetics.

She was Chair of UCC's School of Languages and Literature for 2002-2004.

The Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) awarded her a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellowship 2003-2004 to carry out full-time research on the tragic heroine in fifth-century BCE Greek, seventeenth-century French, and contemporary, drama.

She am one of the co-editors of the forthcoming complete annotated scholarly variorum edition of the works of George Sand: her first critical edition was published in 2013 (Paris, Champion) and a second is forthcoming. She am a contributor to the Dictionnaire George Sand (Paris, Champion) published in 2016. In 2020 she was an invited speaker on In Our Time presented by Melvyn, Lord Bragg, BBC Radio 4: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dxsr

The University of Barcelona (Autonoma) invited her to give the opening keynote lecture at their conference Sujet et traduction in November 2004 on: Lector, auctor, auctoritas: la question du sujet dans les écrits d’Aristote, Montaigne et Compagnon.

The research centre ERCIF (Universite Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux III) invited her to give the opening keynote lecture of their 20th anniversary conference Le Féminin en héritage in April 2005 on: Fruits défendus et corps défendant dans Extrême fidélité d'Hélène Cixous.

The Association internationale des études françaises (Président: Antoine Compagnon, Collège de France) elected her as a membre du Conseil in 2012, and appointed her as a Présidente de journée, on the topic of Heroism Studies, for their LVII congress 2015, École Normale Supérieure, Paris. She co-edited the proceedings, published in 2016 (Paris, Les Belles lettres). The council of the AIEF has honoured her by election as Vice-présidente in 2023.

In her teaching, a constant value-ethics is the reminder to students that one of the most important things they learn in a degree programme is how to think. For example: critical thinking, how to think for themselves; to take responsibility for themselves; how to read for full understanding; the difference between a fact and an opinion, and how to evaluate the quality of the facts and opinions they encounter; how to make their case, in any situation; how to communicate as well as possible, using techniques of voice-training for actors and singers; how to use their imagination in harmony with their reason, including for public good activities, following the alethic value-ethics of such traditions as the Enlightenment, situated thinking, human rights.

Research Interests

French and comparative (chiefly English and Irish) literature and thought, especially:

(1) Theory: philosophy and psychoanalysis applied to literature and cultural studies; myth and anthropology; contemporary French theory, especially Barthes, Bourdieu, Compagnon; the rhetoric of the body, especially in Cixous, Belghoul, Ernaux; art history;

(2) cultural studies (including women in the media, and traductology);

A recent major research project, generously supported by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (Senior Research Fellowship), is on the tragic heroine, especially in 5th century Greek, 17th century French and late 20th century tragedy. She has published on Euripides, Racine and Corneille, the heroines of Molière, `heroinic' representation in the sculptures of Camille Claudel.

She completed in 2013 a volume (Un hiver à Majorque) as one of the editors of the current scholarly critical edition of the complete works of George Sand, under the direction of Professeur Béatrice Didier, of the Ecole Normale supérieure. She is the only Irish scholar in this team. She am currently editing Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré in the same series

She has organised a number of conferences which have brought to UCC a range of French Studies scholars of world class reputation, leaders in the field such as Professor Antoine Compagnon of the Sorbonne, Columbia University and the Collège de France; Professor Jacques Neefs of Paris VIII and Johns Hopkins University, Professor Béatrice Didier of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, Professor Diana Knight of the University of Nottingham, Professor Naomi Segal of the University of London, Professor Jane Conroy of NUI Galway, Professor Paul Hegarty of the University of Nottingham. A number of her students have gained opportunities for doctoral study awards through these events. As part of ongoing projects in Heroism Studies, she organised in 2013 a conference Medea Today with world-famous dramatic artist Dr Fiona Shaw CBE

Her active interests include singing (solo and choral), painting, art history, acting, philosophy and psychology, ancient cultures, rose-growing, swimming.

(Er, there may or may not have been an Irish-French participant in Peter Gordon’s play Murdered to Death by UCC Players, UCC Common Room Christmas 2015. She is admitting nothing. The butler was holding the gun at the end).