Rate My Professor Nina Parish

Professor Nina Parish is the Head of the School of Modern Languages & Cultures and Professor of French at the University of Glasgow, a position she took up on 1 August 2025. In this role, she leads the school within the College of Arts & Humanities, overseeing research, teaching, and administration in modern languages and cultures. Prior to joining Glasgow, Professor Parish held the position of Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Stirling, where she also served as Head of the Division of Literature and Languages and as Director of Research for the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF 2021). Before Stirling, she was a Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Bath.

Her academic interests centre on French and Francophone studies, particularly the representation of difficult histories, the migrant experience, and multilingualism within museum spaces. Professor Parish has developed an international research profile through her involvement in major collaborative projects funded by the European Union. Notably, she participated in the DisTerrMem project under Horizon 2020, which investigated the management of competing memories associated with disputed territories, with case studies drawn from Armenia, Pakistan, Poland, and Lithuania. Her work also encompasses text-image interactions in modern and contemporary French literature and poetry, with a special focus on the artist and writer Henri Michaux. She has extensive teaching experience encompassing twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and Francophone literature, visual arts and film, museum and memory studies, as well as language teaching and translation.

Professor Parish has made significant contributions to her field through publications and editorial work. Key works include co-editing Memory Cultures of War in European War Museums (2022) with Stefan Berger and others, and the article “War Museums as Agonistic Spaces: Possibilities, Opportunities and Constraints” published in the International Journal of Heritage Studies in 2019, co-authored with Anna Cento Bull, Hans Lauge Hansen, and Wulf Kansteiner. She also co-edited Writing the Real: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary French Poetry with Emma Wagstaff. Her research has been featured in projects such as UNREST, exploring war museums as sites of contested memory.