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Professor Charles Forsdick, Drapers Professor of French at Â鶹ƵµÀ, introduces his forthcoming inaugual lecture.

In this inaugural lecture, I reflect on the role that walking – as subject matter, practice and method – has played (and continues to play) in my research and teaching over the past three decades. I have, for instance, explored essayism as a peripatetic genre, studied the re-emergence of pilgrimage and journeying on foot in contemporary travelogues in French, considered the place of walking in the activation of memory, analysed the centrality of pedestrianism to the deceleration and heightened sensory engagement evident in the forms of microtravel that have attracted growing interest in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The lecture also engages with a current project on travel writing and the body, and most notably with its focus on a corpus of texts by authors travelling with a disability. This work is a reminder of the risks of romanticizing walking, of the need to understand the practice as constantly conditioned by a range of social variables. I draw on these examples to develop a broader reflection on the place of walking in the disciplinary field of modern languages – and on its functioning in embodied processes of linguistic acquisition and the associated development of intercultural awareness. Walking, I argue, provides a privileged framework for encounter with streetscapes, cityscapes, memoryscapes, soundscapes, linguascapes. It nurtures curiosity, operates as a source of creativity, but also encourages criticality. In short, it is time to reflect seriously on what it means to walk like a linguist.

Charles Forsdick is a specialist in the field of Francophone postcolonial studies, with particular interests in postcolonial literature and colonial history. His research and teaching explore a range of topics including travel writing, translation, world literature and graphic fiction. Following his first post as Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow, he moved to the James Barrow Chair of French at the University of Liverpool in 2001, a post he held until his election to the Drapers Chair of French in Cambridge in 2023. A Member of the Academy of Europe and Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, he is also currently Lead Fellow for Languages at the British Academy.