Marie-Catherine Allard

Marie-Catherine Allard is a fifth year PhD candidate in Cultural Mediations here at Carleton. She has the honour of being supervised by Dr. Sarah Casteel and is privileged to be working with Dr. James Casteel and Dr. Deidre Butler as her thesis committee members. Her dissertation, which is entitled “Remediating Memory: Narrating the Kindertransport in Literature and Popular Culture,” focuses on the narratives of Karen Gershon, Ruth Barnett, and Frank Meisler. In her work, she explores the ways in which the Kinder’s numerous retellings of their evacuation and remediation from one medium or literary genre to another foster the reconfiguration of their Kindertransport experience. Marie-Catherine has been awarded the Andras Memorial Award to support her research on the artistic representation of the Kindertransport, the rescue operation which allowed, before the outbreak of World War II, for the relocation of ten thousand children at risk of deportation from Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Danzig mainly to Great Britain.

Marie-Catherine graduated from Bishop’s University with a Bachelor’s degree in Modern Languages with concentrations in German and Italian Studies and a Hispanic Studies Major. She then earned a M.A in World Literatures and Cultures at the University of Ottawa. By focusing on the Saussurian sign as well as on East German cinema, her Major Research Paper project challenges the official date of the opening of the Berlin wall by demonstrating that it artistically collapsed before 1989.

Research Interests

Global Holocaust Studies, Borderlands Narratives, Migration and Diaspora, Memory Studies, Lesser-used and Minority Languages, Self-Articulation and Performativity of Identity, and Phonetic and Morphology.

Peer-reviewed Publications

Allard, Marie-Catherine. ”The Era of the Uprooted Child Survivor,” Holocaust in Popular Culture. Eds. Mahitosh Mandal and Priyanka Das. Springer, 2020. (Forthcoming).

Allard, Marie-Catherine. ”Modelling Bridges between Past and Current Issues of Forced Migration: Frank Meisler’s Memorial Sculpture Kindertransport-The Arrival,” Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, vol.51. Ed. Michael Berkowitz. University College London Press, April 2020. 86-104. Print.

Allard, Marie-Catherine. ”La représentation spatio-temporel d’un Berlin mélancolique dans: Les Ailes du désir (Der Himmel über Berlin) ”Confetti 2 (2016). Eds. Alicia Niemann et Marie-Catherine Allard. Ottawa: University of Ottawa, 2016. 77-95. Print.

Recent Conference Presentations

Allard, Marie-Catherine. “(Re)writing Survival Journeys: Narrating the Kindertransport in Literature and Popular Culture” Third Annual Memory Studies Association Conference, MSA, June 22, 2019, Faculty of Philology, Complutense University of Madrid, ES.

Allard, Marie-Catherine. “Et si tradition rimait avec action: Frank Meisler et la représentation artistique du Kindertransport ” Engager le dialogue-Savoirs-Sociétés: Prise de parole et dialogue : rétablir la confiance après la violence, Acfas (Association canadienne-française pour l’avancement des sciences), May 27, 2019, Université du Québec en Outaouais, Gatineau, QC.

Allard, Marie-Catherine. “Modelling Bridges between Past and Current Issues of Forced Migration: Frank Meisler’s Memorial Sculpture Kindertransport-The Arrival” The Kindertransport 80 Years On: Approaches to Kindertransport Research and Historiography, KT80, Jan.22, 2019, Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London, London, UK. Conference Presentation.

Literary publications

Allard, Marie-Catherine, and Élisabeth Allard. ”Table Ronde du Souvenir” La Filiation d’Oscar  Gélinas et Yvonne Rheault: De 1658 à 2017. Design Grafik. 2017.

Allard, Marie-Catherine. Vendre ou vendu? Prix de la création Radio-Canada – La Violoncelliste. 2017.

Allard, Marie-Catherine. Le Cose invissibili ou L’Art d’apprécier le monde différemment.  Edilivre. 2016.

Allard, Marie-Catherine, and al. ODiaspora. University of Ottawa, 2015.