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Staff Members
Dr William Jennings
| Role: |
Senior Lecturer | Convenor of French |
| Qualifications: |
BSc, MA, PhD Auckland |
| Email: |
w.jennings@waikato.ac.nz |
| Location: |
I3.03D |
| Contact: |
+64 7 838 4466 ext. 8446 |
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Research Interests:
William Jennings has research interests in two strands: literary innovation and French colonial history.
The innovators include Nobel laureate Andre Gide (1869-1951) and Gustave Flaubert, and at present he is working on a study of author Amelie Nothomb (b. 1967).
Many of his early publications were in Creole Studies and focussed on the early French exploration and settlement of the Caribbean. More recently, he has been working on the first French Marist missionaries to New Zealand, drawing on the Lettres recues d'Oceanie. This 7000-page collection of letters written by Marists in New Zealand and the Pacific from 1838-54 was published in 2009 after Father Charles Girard spent sixteen years transcribing the original letters in the Marist Archives in Rome. The letters are an almost untouched source of descriptions about life and people in New Zealand and the Pacific during early years of European contact. Dr Jennings is working on the translation into English of the New Zealand letters, and has also written several papers on their content, ranging from descriptions of the New Zealand landscape to a contribution to the recent controversy on Maori cannibalism.
Selected Publications:
2009 Conference papers and departmental seminars
'Chateaubriand in New Zealand: the Marist missionaries and the legacy of romanticism.' New Zealand Universities Interdepartmental French Seminar, Hamilton.
'Translating the New Zealand Marist Letters.' The Letters of the Missionaries, Good Shepherd College, Auckland.
'Travel writing and the first Marists in New Zealand.' Lettres reçues d'Océanie - Letters Received from Oceania: 1836 - 1854, Victoria University of Wellington.
'Māori in the correspondence of the first Marist Missionaries (1838-54).' School of Māori and Pacific Development.
'A new view of Māori in the 1840s: the correspondence of the Marists.'Department of Societies and Cultures.
Gonneville's encounter with inhabitants of Terra Australis and Brazil in 1504.' Department of Societies and Cultures.
'Travel writing and the first Marists in New Zealand.' Department of History.
'Languages under threat in France.' Department of General and Applied Linguistics.
Research Publications:
You may like to view publications from 1997 onwards for Dr William Jennings
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