About
Marion Demossier is a social anthropologist by training. She is passionate about teaching ethnography as a modern languages method and believes that ethnographic theories and practices provide a unique mode of analysis of contemporary cultures and societies. Her research seeks to engage with different forms of ethnographies in diverse geographic locations, at different historical junctures and across humanities and social sciences.
Her fieldwork experience includes France, Italy, the UK, New-Zealand, Switzerland and Zambia. Her research focuses on wine-growers and terroir defined as a link between place, taste and 'quality'. Her new project investigates the relationship wine-growers have established with the environment and the ecological turn which has emerged in French rural society.
Her expertise extends to food heritage, museums, the Roma and French politics and policies.
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- climate ethnography and environment and climate change
- French and European politics
- Republicanism
- Anthropology of Food & Wine
- Terroir
Current research
Her current research lies with climate ethnography and viticulture and is developing cross-disciplinary dialogues with the natura sciences.
She is also working on the Musee des Confluences in Lyon on 'Objects as zone contact'. She is also one of the founders of the Debating Ethnography research Group located in Modern Languages and Linguistics and working in Interdiscplinarity.
Publications
Teaching
She teaches a first year HUM1038 module Introduction to Ethnography: Food and Culture, a second year module on European Identity (LANG 2009) and a popular final year module on Fragmented France (FREN3029). She supervises MA and PhD students in Applied Linguistics, French and Francophone Studies and Anthropology.
External roles and responsibilities
Biography
Marion Demossier is Professor of French and Anthropology in Modern Languages and Linguistics at the University of Southampton. She was Head of Department from 2015-2018. She has previously taught French and European politics and society since 1994 at the University of Bath. She holds a Ph.D in Social Anthropology from the EHESS (École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) in Paris.
Prizes
- Prize Luciens Perriaux (regional history Burgundy) (1996)
- John Willis award, University of Bath (1999)
- FNAC Prize (2000)
- The Routledge Handbook of Wine Culture (2023)