Research team
Expertise
Emmanuelle Labeau joined the University of Antwerp in September 2024 as Professor of French Synchronic Linguistics. Until then, her whole career took place at Aston University (Birmingham, UK) that she joined on an initial 9-month contract as French Language Colloquial Assistant. The struggles her students encountered in using the French past tenses spurred her into starting a PhD on the acquisition of French past tenses by L1 English learners. Over the years, she has held research leadership positions including research enhancer for Languages, Translation and History and Director of the Aston Centre for Applied Linguistics where she launched CLIL Mondays, a monthly online seminar on content and language integrated learning, and hosted the Aston Interpreters Network. Emmanuelle has published extensively on the French verbal system from various perspectives: acquisition, evolution, variation... Her research has dealt with past tenses (including a recent monograph on the French simple past), come- and go-periphrases in a dozen of articles with Jacques Bres (Montpellier 3), and diatopic and diamesic variation with colleagues in North America such as Helene Blondeau (University of Florida) and Mireille Tremblay (Universite de Montreal). Emmanuelle's research is anchored in authentic documents and she launched with Anne Dister (St Louis / UCL)the Corpus de francais parle a Bruxelles (sister corpus of the Parisian CFPP2000) that has received funding from the British Academy, the Delegation generale a la langue francaise et aux langues de France and the FNRS. Emmanuelle was one of three national fellows for the future of language(s) research whose remit was to advise the Arts and Humanities Research Council on future funding directions. Emmanuelle's project, Birmingham Research for Upholding Multilingualism (BRUM), looked at the presence of and need for languages in the superdiverse context of Birmingham and resulted in collaboration with the City Council and the National Health Services. In Britain, Emmanuelle was a leading advocate for multilingualism and held several high profile positions including French Studies Representative at the University Council for Languages and Vice-President UK affairs of the Association for French Language Studies, She sat on the committees of the Society for French Studies, AUPHF+, AMLUK and UCGAL. Emmanuelle's current research focuses on the expression of the future, the use of tenses in advanced French such as social media and AI generated text. As in Birmingham, Emmanuelle is looking forward to making her research relevant to Antwerp, by exploring the position of French and multilingualism in the City. Emmanuelle speaks fluent English and French, and is working hard on developing her school Dutch!