Bridget Jones (academic)

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Bridget Jones
Born
Bridget Heather Wheeler

(1935-11-20)20 November 1935
London, England
Died4 April 2000(2000-04-04) (aged 64)
Oxford, England
NationalityBritish
Other namesBridget Heather Jones, Bridget Wheeler Jones
EducationMinchenden Grammar School
Alma materNewnham College, Cambridge
Occupation(s)Academic, writer
Years active1963–1995
Known forintroducing authors from the francophone Caribbean to French language and literature studies programs

Bridget Jones (20 November 1935 – 4 April 2000) was a British literary academic who pioneered the inclusion of Caribbean literature in European university studies programs. While teaching French literature at the

Roehampton Institute
. An annual award, distributed by the Society for Caribbean Studies, as well as a scholarship program, given by the University of the West Indies, are named in her honour.

Early life

Bridget Heather Wheeler was born on 20 November 1935

First-class honours in Medieval and Modern Languages Tripos. While at Cambridge she met, Donald Jones, a Jamaican student, studying chemical engineering, whom she would later marry.[1][2] Wheeler spent 1958 in France, working as an assistant in Douai and then returned to London in 1959, to marry Jones and begin her PhD studies at King's College London under the tutelage of John M. Cocking.[2]

Career

In 1963, Jones' husband took a position at an oil refinery in Jamaica and the couple relocated to

The Sunday Gleaner[2] and hosted legendary parties featuring local cuisine and music.[1][2] After a year, she joined the faculty of the University of the West Indies (UWI), as a lecturer in the French Department.[5]

Two years before, the University College of the West Indies, as it was then called, gained independence from the

syllabi and supervised the PhD studies of one of the first thesis projects, which explored French-Caribbean literature.[4]

Jones' teaching on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French language and literature was supplemented by her publications which included works on Afro-, Anglo- and Franco-Caribbean literary figures.[5] Her research focused on such writers as Léon Damas, René Depestre and Simone Schwarz-Bart, among others, and she compiled with Merle Hodge an anthology of francophone Caribbean poets. Developing an interest in folk culture, Jones served on the UWI faculty committee to develop programs around Caribbean folklore themes and wrote articles for the Folklore Bulletin.[4] She was also involved with the university's theatre programme and organised productions of Afro- and French-Caribbean plays and recitations. In 1981, she began working with the Caribbean Examinations Council, conducting research into the qualifications required for degree certification.[6]

Economic downturns in the 1970s and 1980s forced Jones' husband to look abroad for work. When he relocated to

Roehampton Institute to teach in the department of modern languages.[1] In 1989, Jones and other academics in the UK, founded the Association for the Study of Caribbean and African Literature in French (ASCALF), to promote the inclusion of literature from the Caribbean in higher education curricula.[7]

In 1992, Jones was diagnosed with cancer and after treatment resulted in its remission, resumed her publishing and research trips to the

French overseas Caribbean departments.[8] She served as chair of ASCALF for the 1994 and 1995 term. Involved in the admissions to the languages department at Roehampton, Jones promoted international networking and organized programmes like Francophonie: mythes, masques et réalités, hosted in 1994, and Surréalisme et francophonie, held in 1997. Participating in international conferences, she assisted in developing materials on Afro- and Franco-Caribbean literature for symposiums such as the Institute of Germanic Studies, the Society for Caribbean Studies, and the Society for French Studies, among others.[7] In the summer of 1995, her cancer returned, prompting Jones to retire and relocate to Oxford with her husband.[8] In 1997, she co-authored with Sita Dickson Littlewood Paradoxes Of French Caribbean Theatre which was a major reference work indexing 400 plays written since 1900 in either French in Creole languages by authors from French Guiana, Guadeloupe, and Martinique.[1]

Death and legacy

Jones died on 4 April 2000 in Oxford.[5] The optional curricula program she designed for inclusion of French Caribbean writers has become a mandatory course in the French literature department at UWI. A scholarship fund was established in her name for students studying French at UWI[3] and in 2003, The Francophone Caribbean Today: Literature, Language, Culture was published as a tribute to her pioneering efforts to expand academic treatment of the Caribbean to literary studies programs. She is considered a pioneer in the development of francophone studies programs in the Caribbean, Ireland and the United Kingdom.[9] The annual Bridget Jones Award is given by the Society for Caribbean Studies to "an arts practitioner from any region in the Caribbean to present their work at the Society's Annual Conference".[10]

Selected works

References

Citations

  1. ^ a b c d e Aub-Buscher 2000.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g Aub-Buscher & Noakes 2003, p. xiv.
  3. ^ a b c Benjamin 2004, p. 62.
  4. ^ a b c d Aub-Buscher & Noakes 2003, p. xv.
  5. ^ a b c The Gleaner 2000, p. 10.
  6. ^ a b Aub-Buscher & Noakes 2003, p. xvi.
  7. ^ a b Aub-Buscher & Noakes 2003, p. xvii.
  8. ^ a b Aub-Buscher & Noakes 2003, p. xviii.
  9. ^ Rodney 2003, p. 21.
  10. ^ Breaking Belize News 2018.
  11. ^ a b c Aub-Buscher & Noakes 2003, p. xix.

Bibliography

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