Dr Manon Mathias
Lecturer in French
manon.mathias@glasgow.ac.uk
https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/mlc/staff/manonmathias/
I was born and raised in Cardiff where I attended a Welsh-medium comprehensive. I undertook my undergraduate degree in French and German at the University of Oxford (Trinity College) where I also completed my postgraduate degrees. After a Masters of Studies in European Literature, I was awarded a D.Phil in 2011 on the novelist George Sand. I worked as Rhys Fund Celtic Teaching Fellow, University of Oxford in 2007–2008 and then as Lecturer in French at Worcester College, University of Oxford from 2010 to 2011. I was Lecturer in French at Bangor University (2011–2012) and the University of Aberdeen (2013–2017). I was appointed as Lecturer in French at Glasgow in 2017.
Research and Teaching Interests
I have published on interactions between the nineteenth-century novel and discourses of science and medicine including digestive health (2019) and bacteriology (2020). My current project is a study of food and health in nineteenth- century French culture looking at advice on diet and digestion in nineteenth-century novels, gastronomical writings and health manuals. As part of the project I organized an international workshop in May 2017 on Gut Feeling to examine changing attitudes towards the digestive system in modern Western culture. The event provided the basis for a volume of essays, Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture (Palgrave: 2018) which I co-edited with Alison Moore (Western Sydney University). To foster further research on digestive health from a historical and cultural perspective, I organized a round table on 'Digestive Health: Then and Now' in November 2017 and a two-day workshop on 'The Gut-Brain Axis: Cultural and Historical Perspectives' in May 2018. This led to a specialist issue of Microbial Ecology in Health & Disease on the 'The Gut-Brain Axis in History and Culture' (2018). After a year of maternity leave (2019-2020) I am now writing my next monograph, Food and Mood: The Gut-Mind Relationship in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Medicine.
Keywords:
Food & HealthHealthNineteenth CenturyNovelPopular Medicine