Catherine Emerson is a Lecturer in French at the University of Galway. Her research is on fifteenth-century literature and storytelling. She is the author of Regarding Manneken Pis. Culture, Celebration and Conflict in Brussels, a book about the ways in which Belgian National Identity has been expressed in various ways using the image of a statue of a peeing child. Her current work looks at a collection of largely humorous short stories, Les Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, exploring, through teaching and performance, the ways in which audiences react to the stories.