Staff Series: An interview with Dr Patrick Kennedy
Patrick Kennedy is a teaching specialist in French studies at the School of Languages and Linguistics. He has recently finished his PhD on the French writer Victor Hugo and is only waiting for the official graduation ceremony.
Valeria spoke with Patrick about his PhD and teaching experience, how he balances his two roles and his future projects.
Valeria Morelli
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Hi Patrick, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. To start us off, can you tell us a bit about yourself?
My name is Patrick Kennedy. I have two roles at the moment, although I have basically finished now my role as a doctoral student and will graduate in August, so I still feel like I’m still in that boat, but largely, otherwise, I’m a teaching specialist here at Melbourne Uni in the French department. Prior to that, last year, I was a head tutor, also teaching French for the department, and I’ve done casual teaching since 2020.
What is your PhD project about?
My thesis is on the French author Victor Hugo, a 19th-century writer. He wrote a lot of theatre, short stories, novels, and poetry. Very prolific in France, he is well known for a couple of things in Anglophone spheres, such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserable. For my thesis, I’ve focused specifically on his poetry. I analysed a corpus of poetic works that he wrote in the middle of his life while exiled in the early 1850s in the Channel Islands, which are two islands between France and Britain. I looked at some of his poetry that is very well renowned in the Francophone sphere, but not for an English-speaking audience. The originality, I suppose, has come primarily from providing a different theoretical perspective to those works, specifically that of recent contributions in French phenomenology, but I also aimed to speak more to English academics and attempt to broaden the conversation out to other disciplines as well, with particular emphasis on including contributions from the philosophy of religion and theology.
That sounds like a very interesting project! You said that you have basically finished your PhD journey and are just waiting for the graduation ceremony to take place. What was your PhD experience like?
I’ve had quite an interesting experience as a PhD student because I started in 2019 and that was before any COVID lockdowns. I had a fantastic first year propelling my research, getting the ideas together and sorting out drafts and structure before confirmation. But when I got to 2020 and with the changes in the health restrictions, that became an interesting time for me, particularly because I didn’t feel like my work was advancing very well. One major reason was that I wasn’t able to come onto campus and form those intellectual communities where you can talk to others about your work. Not having that was quite tough at the start. Then I put myself to work and just went where I thought I wanted to go with my research. When we came back to on-campus life and were able to make those connections again, that’s when I found that I could rework what I’d written. So it took me a while to feel confident about my research, as I didn’t get as much feedback or as much different perspectives and input during the first few drafts as I would have liked. That said, my supervisors were fantastic the whole way through, and it was really great to finally put some thoughts together coherently and get opinions on what a full PhD thesis looks like before submitting it for examination.
Do you have any advice for graduate researchers who are in the final stages?
One thing I would certainly like to mention is: don’t be scared about examiner reports. I know it might come across as daunting, but you should always feel confident that whatever feedback they give you can be taken constructively, particularly for future iterations of your work. I got quite a generous amount of feedback on my two reports, which was good, as their comments were just pushing me towards a better version of my thesis. When you receive your reports, you get the chance to discuss with your supervisors how much you want to change in your thesis or whether or not you can justify why you’d like to keep it the way it is. So you always have that capacity as a budding researcher to push back on what you don’t agree with. In my personal experience, I found that it was just nice to have a lot to think about and it would have been a bit anticlimactic if I had gotten to that point and only had one page of generic notes.
It must be satisfying to see that they took the time to read your work and gave you suggestions on how to improve it.
How did you get into French literature?
I have a personal connection to Québec in Canada. I grew up in the USA, actually, just south of Canada, but my father is from Montréal. I was exposed to a lot of Francophone culture early on growing up, but I didn’t really do anything with that until I got to university and went through the French programme at Melbourne Uni. I started in French 1 some time ago and really enjoyed it. Then I ended up doing an Honours Year here because I particularly enjoyed moving into 19th-century French literature and being able to improve my language skills that way. I did my Honours thesis with my supervisor, Dr Bertrand Bourgeois, and that then led me to think about whether there was more space to do more research on it. I took two years afterwards, though, which I call my “bohemian” years, as I wasn’t sure what exactly I wanted to do. Eventually, I came back to realising that I would really love to continue researching, particularly in the area of 19th-century French literature, because my Honours thesis was on Victor Hugo and a similar set of his poetry.
Great that you continued researching starting from your earlier project.
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Can you tell me more about your teaching experience?
It’s an opportunity that’s been given to me and I’m very fortunate that in the French department they were so encouraging in giving their PhD students the chance to teach if they want. I really enjoyed it, even when I was going back and forth between face-to-face and online. I have taught basically since 2020, with a few patches of not teaching here and there. I think it reminds me of why I started learning French when I was an undergraduate student at Melbourne Uni. I really want to encourage incoming students in the French department to think about continuing their language skills and maybe doing some elective subjects or an Honours Year in the future. I try my best to entice them into that path.
How do you balance teaching and research?
To be honest, the balance has been difficult. My experience has been that finding the balance of producing research outside of teaching commitments can be tough. But ultimately, I still really enjoy both the research that I have done and brainstorming ideas for the future. So I try to stay confident that I can keep up both in a certain capacity. I think it’s helpful to talk about and to recognise that every PhD student will have a different experience and that, for some teaching specialists, there’s no expectation of finding the right balance between teaching and research. There are always different career pathways out there for PhD students who are finishing up and deciding whether they want to pursue their research or not. Postdoctoral studies are a great option if you can secure one because that way you can just focus on research with very minimal, if any, amounts of teaching. I have enjoyed the balance of teaching alongside research and there are ways that you can cross them over. One thing we do in our French 1 programme, for example, is organising an exhibition at the Baillieu Library. They have a terrific rare books collection containing quite a number of materials that they bring out for students to look at, including some first editions of novels that Victor Hugo wrote. So I think that in a language subject, which is so often focused on the basics of grammar and vocabulary, it’s never too early to start engaging them with more creative forms of the language and giving them at least ideas to pick up on if they want to.
From my experience, I noticed that they are very interested since the beginning in the culture of the language they’re learning.
Something that we in the French department promote is broadening our cultural focus away from just Paris or mainland France and giving students the opportunity to look all around the Francophone world. I think that’s important, both from the students’ point of view and for us as a programme to be adding in a transnational aspect to our materials, rather than restricting them to one area or another. There are certainly many students that have personal connections to different countries in the world that speak French, and it’s always about making sure they have the resources and knowledge to engage with those connections and avoid making learning a language seem too abstract.
I totally agree, it is really constructive for students.
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What are your future projects?
I’ve got quite a number of projects on the go, which is both good and bad. My main research project at the moment after finishing my PhD is looking towards converting it into a book, so sending off a book proposal in the next six months is my main priority. But then, of course, there’s also work needed to be done for journal article publishing. I’m revising a couple of articles that are in the “revise and resubmit” stage. So that’s ongoing, tweaking things to get some smaller publications moved forward. Then there’s also thinking about new research after the PhD, although it’s difficult to find the mental space to do this during semesters. Thinking up new ideas, particularly for research, can be hard when there are lots of pressing deadlines for assessments and for teaching a subject. But on the other hand, it is often with students and teaching colleagues that interesting ideas are forged, so it’s worth the effort!
Thank you, Patrick, for chatting with me, it was great to hear about your research and teaching experience!
Thank you, Valeria.