Elaine Kennedy-Dubourdieu began her adult life at eighteen as a VSO Volunteer, teaching pupils sometimes older than herself at Njase Girls’ School, the only girls’ secondary school in the southern province of Zambia.
She then read French at Leicester University … having initially enrolled to read Sociology, but after two weeks of Durkheim she gave up on that idea. The third year of her honours degree was spent as a student in Bordeaux, where she followed classes in oenology, where she met and subsequently married Bernard Dubourdieu. They went to live in Marrakech for two years, before returning to France. As she has dual French/British nationality, she was able to take the necessary competitive exams (C.A.P.E.S and Agrégation) to become a teacher and French civil servant.
She spent most of her career at Nantes University as Senior Lecturer, teaching language, translation and what the French intriguingly called ‘civilisation’ - a mixture of History and Politics.
Elaine was responsible for various exchanges: University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, Manchester Metropolitan, Liverpool Hope and the University of Tromso … which she set up after a Nantes student pleaded with her that he was desperate to return to Tromso to see his Norwegian girlfriend.
With her colleague Wilma, in 1996 she set up and ran the British Film festival in Nantes - which happily continues to this day. It was wonderful to be able to bring British film, and British directors and actors to the City of Nantes and its University.
In 2007 she set up and taught ‘L’anglais créatif’ - which must have been one of the first creative writing classes in a French University… the French being somewhat recalcitrant to accepting what they considered a non-Cartesian form of teaching.
Elaine Kennedy-Dubourdieu has now retired and is able to spend her time writing: essays (mostly on trying to understand the French) short stories and drama - sweet and sour comedies which are proving horrendously difficult to transpose into French. How do you translate a good joke? Try it. It’s complicated.