The Critical French Medical Humanities

In the 1990s the phenomenon known today as ‘French Cultural Studies’ emerged in the UK under the broad umbrella of French and Francophone Studies. Adopting an nterdisciplinary approach, French Cultural Studies sought to open up new ways of looking at France and the French-speaking world through the ideas, images, and narratives of more than a century of turbulent history and political change. Forbes and Kelly (1995)1 – who wrote the first significant introduction to French Cultural Studies – placed special emphasis on culture as the live constituent (the ‘visible territory’) through which a nation, a people and the individual struggle to define themselves (290). In identifying ‘culture’ as the shifting ground of national and individual identity, the co-authors tapped into the embodied experience of citizens. French Cultural Studies has since flourished as an academic pursuit, embedding itself in curricula in degrees in French Studies and shaping individual and collective research portfolios