Dr Saskia Huc-Hepher
I am Reader in Diasporic and Digital French Studies and Assistant Head of the School of Humanities. I have previously been Employability Director for the School of Humanities, Course Leader for BA Languages and International Business, and Course Leader for BA Translation. Prior to joining the University of Westminster on a full-time basis, I worked as a freelance translator and interpreter in the UK, and teacher of English in France.
Author of French London: A blended ethnography of a migrant city, my research focuses on questions of identity, homemaking and (un)belonging among London’s French diaspora in online and offline contexts. I am currently co-editor of Digital Modern Languages (Modern Languages Open) and published a special issue on New Directions in Digital Modern Languages Research in 2024. I have co-organised international conferences, including the AHRC-funded Digital Diasporas conference in 2019 and the 2025 Born-Digital Collections, Archives and Memory conference, for which I am on the programme committee. I am also curator of the London French Special Collection in the UK Web Archive, a corpus of around 160 French community web resources, supported by the British Library and recognised by the French Embassy. The collection, which was the first of its kind to be housed in a national memory institution, aims to preserve this fragile digital cultural heritage for generations to come.
I am deeply committed to supporting the work of Early Career Researchers and, as such, am currently a mentor on the British-Academy-funded Migrants In Transit: A transdisciplinary writing programme for emerging scholars of migration in Tunisia project, which I co-lead, and am co-editing a special issue in National Identities that brings together a diverse range of doctoral research articles under the theme of Emotional diasporas: Sensing places, feeling belongings and embodying identities in transnational spaces.
Additional responsibilities:
My research focuses on the French diaspora in London, in both offline and online, contemporary and historic, contexts. I am interested in blended ethnographic and oral history methodologies in transdisciplinary, transmodal and transcultural contexts. Bourdieusian and xenofeminist theories frame my work, as do the social semiotic concepts of Gunther Kress and the British school of multimodality.
Working at the interface of visual, linguistic and digital culture has allowed me to make innovative contributions to the under-theorised field of web archiving, which resulted in my nomination for the 2018 Digital Preservation Awards and a dedicated REF2021 Impact Case Study.
Research projects
Migrants In Transit: A transdisciplinary writing programme for emerging scholars of migration in Tunisia Co-Lead (British Academy International Writing Workshop), 2023-25
London Transformation Project Co-Lead (Language Acts and Worldmaking AHRC Small Grant), 2017-2020
Big UK Domain Data in the Arts and Humanities (AHRC-funded) researcher, led by the Institute of Historical Research, the British Library and the Oxford Internet Institute, 2015
Analytical Access to the Domain Dark Archive (JISC-funded) researcher, 2012
History of the French in London (British Academy-funded) project researcher, 2010-12
Languages and International Events: Are we ready to talk to the World in 2012? (HEFCE-funded) project researcher, 2007-2008
Doctoral Research Supervision
1) A Radical Intervention: Translating Black Caribbean Writers (Anita Barton-Williams)
2) Locating London’s Chinatown: Multicultural Heritage and Place-making in a Global City (Xiao Ma)
3) The (De) Colonial Dynamics of 'Im-mobility' in 21st-century Representations of Migration: An Interdisciplinary Study of Translingual (Counter) Narratives around (North) African 'Harga' to EU-rope (Khaoula Zitouni)
I welcome proposals from those wishing to embark on doctoral research in areas related to migration and diaspora studies, digital French studies, transnational French studies, digital cultural heritage and web archiving.