On May 7, 2023, the 9^th Doctoral Forum and the 16th Master’s Forum on French in National Universities, jointly organized by the Chinese Association for the Study of French Language and the Department of French of Shanghai International Studies University, was successfully held online. The theme of the forum was “Artificial Intelligence: Digital Transformation and the Future of Human Civilization”, and there were four sub-forums for PhD students and four sub-forums for MA students in the fields of literature, linguistics, translation and country-region. The three PhD students of ECNU French Department won the first and second prizes respectively.

The paper “La relation humain-machine dans Les Liens artificiels de Nathan Devers” by Xie Fei, a PhD student of the Department of French, Class of 2021, won the first prize in the PhD Forum. The two second prizes went to 2022 PhD student Zhang Xiaoyu’s thesis, “Du récit historique au récit littéraire: la construction de l’auctorialité des trois écrivains francophones de l’Afrique occidentale au XXe siècle”, and 2022 PhD student Yuan Shiyu’s thesis, “Du postcolonialisme au posthumanisme: le problème de la frontière dans Nulle part dans la maison de mon père et Klara et le soleil”. All three award-winning papers were supervised by Professor Yuan Xiaoyi.

Having been founded for 16 years, the National Postgraduate Forum on French in Universities aims to provide a broad communication platform for master’s and doctoral students in French in all universities. In recent years, students and teachers of the French Department have actively participated in the forum, exchanging ideas and learning with experts and scholars as well as students from sister institutions, and have won many awards so far.