Viviane Blanchard is a lecturer in French language education at King’s Language Centre. She graduated from Université Jean Moulin Lyon III with a BA in Modern Languages and went on to study for an MA in Modern Languages at the University of Surrey. In 2010, she received a History of Art degree from Birkbeck College, sparking her interest in sound art and gender studies. She subsequently enrolled in a doctoral research programme centred on the francophone documentaires radiophoniques de création, uncovering the links between this predominantly female, contemporary practice and the poetic work of proponents of écriture féminine in France. 

 Since then, she has been exploring ways of using this engaging auditory medium in the classroom, encouraging other ways of learning and communicating through embodied listening and creative writing. Her research interests include memory and sound archives, oral history, feminist and queer cultures, and how the language of affect, emotional resonance and the inter/trans-subjectivity involved in listening contribute to learning, self-fashioning and a deeper understanding of the world around us. In 2024-25, she contributes to several SIGs and collaborative projects within King’s Language Centre, as well as with the Department of Language, Litterature and Culture and with members of the wider UK university network.

Viviane is also a keen radio listener and documentarist in her spare time. In 2014, she contributed to the production of a collective audio documentary under the direction of award-winning documentarist Kaye Mortley, produced by Phonurgia Nova.