Isabelle joined the Fellowship in 2005 as College Associate Professor in French and Film and Philomathia Fellow. She was an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, and a key figure in Cambridge Film & Screen. She made substantial contributions to College life, not least as a supervisor and Director of Studies in MML; as a long-serving Undergraduate Tutor; as Secretary to the College’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Advisory Group, which she was instrumental in establishing, and in delivering the Eden Oration in 2023. Her compassion and commitment were evident to all, and her absence is felt in every corner of the College.
Isabelle was a brilliant thinker who specialised in Francophone cinema, feminist film theory and creative practice in relation to memory, urban space, Internet culture and girlhood. Her monograph Memory and the Moving Image: French Film in the Digital Era was published in 2010, and she was in the process of writing her second monograph, The Rooftops of Paris: Cinematic Perspectives. Her Trinity Hall office at the top of D Staircase, whose windows look out over the rooftops of North Court, Gonville and Caius and beyond, offered the perfect vantage point for her reflections on urban spaces and their inherent power dynamics.
Unsurprisingly, for one whose work drew on the importance of both space and creative practice, her office in D14 was carefully curated to inspire creativity and to challenge assumed structures of power and knowledge transfer in a pedagogic context by emphasising equity, care and comfort. Isabelle’s philosophical and personal engagement with a feminist ethics of care carried into the work done by the Tactics and Praxis seminar (a flat-hierarchy group exploring feminist and ethical intersections between academic and creative work, of which she was an instigating member) and the New School of the Anthropocene (which provides a radical, affordable education as an alternative to mainstream university for activists, creatives and instigators of change, on whose advisory board she served). She was also a co-founder and trustee of the Cambridge Film Trust.
Isabelle’s wide-ranging academic interests and commitment to equity, diversity and experimentation led a distinctively creative and inclusive pedagogy. She delighted in the progress of her students, went above and beyond to lend support when they struggled, and encouraged their creativity and imagination. She was, as a result, beloved and respected by the student community. Shortly before her death, Isabelle learned that she had won the University’s prestigious Pilkington Prize, awarded in recognition of her influence in relation to inclusivity and the diversification of materials and approaches, and her innovative and consistent reimagination of the possibilities of research, teaching and their interrelations. Isabelle knew that ‘the College’ is a community of people first, and an institution second. In her Eden Oration, she echoed the Care Collective’s call to “begin by avowing care, in all of its ubiquitous complexities, and by building more enduring and participatory caring outlooks, contexts and infrastructures, wherever we can”. She encouraged us to “nurture our own community in this College”; to “collectively bring that energy to Trinity Hall”.
We will follow her example, and we will remember her when we do.
