Raylene Ramsay

Raylene Lammas Ramsay (born 1945) is a professor emerita of French culture, in New Zealand. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi.

Education

Ramsay attended Otago Girls' High School, from where she won a university entrance scholarship in 1964. She undertook doctoral studies under the direction of Ida Frandon (1907–1997) at the University of Poitiers, publishing her thesis, a study of the works of writer and film director Alain Robbe-Grillet, in 1972.

Personal life

Ramsay married veterinary surgeon and former All Black Michael O'Callaghan on 30 January 1971 in Poitiers, France.

FRSNZ nom

Professor Raylene Ramsay is a distinguished authority on major trends in contemporary French cultural production. She began by establishing her knowledge and understanding of some of the most influential and difficult of the French postmodern writers, including Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras and, especially, Alain Robbe-Grillet. Her book on 'Robbe-Grillet and Modernity' (1992) related Robbe-Grillet's work to a paradoxical modern scientific spirit, and her study of 'The French New Autobiographies' (1996) emphasized underlying principles of complementarity; both received warm praise and were admired for their well-informed theoretical perspectives, including the extended fields of microphysics, chaos theory and psychoanalysis. Professor Ramsay then continued her work on French women. Her study of 'French Women in Politics' (2003) received a major editorial award. On her return to New Zealand from North America in 1994, Professor Ramsay extended her work to the Francophone literatures of the Pacific, in particular translating Kanak texts from New Caledonia and publishing studies of indigenous writing in French. This culminated in a theoretically based monograph, ‘Rethinking Hybridity. The Literatures of the French Pacific’, in the University of Liverpool Francophone series (2014). Professor Ramsay is a productive scholar, with four monographs, two edited books, a number of translations including a co-authored translation of the first Kanak novel, and over 50 articles. She has made an energetic and committed contribution to the profession generally, writing reviews, frequently attending conferences (often to present plenary sessions), serving on several editorial boards, reading manuscripts, and sustaining an active membership of several research networks. She fostered collaborations between French departments in New Zealand, Australia, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, France and the USA, and the development of a number of younger scholars, supervising 11 doctoral theses and assisting her students in seeking academic positions. At Auckland University she served as the Head of the School of European Languages and Literatures (2000-2004) and Head of French. She has been a member of the Humanities panel for the Marsden Fund and of the Humanities and Law panel for the PBRF. Throughout her career, Professor Ramsay managed relations with the French academic and cultural world through some difficult times, and in 2006 she was made a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, an award bestowed by the French Ministry of Culture for her outstanding contribution to French culture. Raylene has been Professor Emerita since her retirement in 2014.

Selected publications

• Raylene Ramsay (31 December 1999). "Chapter 9. Postmodernism and the Monstrous Criminal". Detecting texts: the metaphysical detective story from Poe to postmodernism: 199–214. doi:10.9783/9780812205459.199. Wikidata Q109897263.
• Raylene Ramsay (1 December 2008). "In the belly of the canoe with Ihimaera, Hulme and Gorod. The waka as a locus of hybridity". International Journal of Francophone Studies. 11 (4): 559–579. doi:10.1386/IJFS.11.4.559_1. ISSN 1368-2679. Wikidata Q109897260.