Emma Wilson is the daughter of novelist Jacqueline Wilson and her former husband, William Millar Wilson, a police officer. She was a scholarship student at Surbiton High School and then studied French and Latin as an undergraduate at Cambridge. She then stayed on to do a PhD in the French department. Her thesis was entitled The pain of the pleasure of the text: Tournier, reading and sexuality. Wilson then got a post as a university lecturer at Cambridge.
Research
As a researcher, Wilson is author of six books and over twenty articles published in scholarly journals in the field of modern languages and film. Her published work includes book studies of Alain Resnais and Krzysztof Kieslowski as well as specific work on writers such as Marcel Proust, Marguerite Duras, Hélène Cixous and Michel Tournier. As well as her contribution to these author fields, however, Wilson's writing has applications to critical theory. In her 1996 work, Sexuality and the Reading Encounter, Wilson makes a contribution to reader response theory in relation to feminism and queer theory. She argues for the potential for change in the reader's identity through reading. The encounter between reader and text, she says, depends "not on pre-constructed identities, but on the very performance of identity in the process of reading." Wilson is particularly interested in the way that readers position themselves in relation to representations of desiring relations. Wilson's 2003 study of the cinematic treatment of missing children, Cinema’s Missing Children, was described as "a book rich in academic and cultural backstory".
On 6 May 2009, Wilson was awarded an Ordre des Palmes Académiques Chevalier medal by the UK French Ambassador. This prestigious award is awarded by the French government to academics and educators. It recognises Wilson's sustained contribution to the dissemination of French culture and to education. As well as her active contribution to the teaching and research of her department, Wilson has set up a number of links between Cambridge University and French institutions such as the École Normale Supérieure-Lettres et Sciences humaines in Lyon with which Cambridge now has a very successful ERASMUS programme.
