Dr David Ewing is a Career Development Fellow (teaching and research) at Queen's College, Oxford, with a specialism in thought and literature in the twentieth-century Francosphere. He is committed to an inclusive teaching practice and to the project of disciplinary decolonization.
Teaching
David teaches literature of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries to students of French (Prelims Papers III and IV; FHS Papers VIII, XI, and XIV), as well as literary translation and critical theory. His teaching draws on a range of literary and intellectual materials produced in French since the revolutionary upheavals of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. In tutorials, David is particularly interested to explore how contemporary critical concerns (e.g. analyses of coloniality/colonialism, capitalism, ecology, technology, and gender) change the ways in which we understand literary history, and what happens to those concerns when they pass through sustained analysis of literary texts and their contexts.
Research
David's research investigates how novels published at the centre of the collapsing French empire (c. 1944–1981) deal with the promises and devastations of an advancing modernity. His PhD (2024) argued that experiments with the French novel between 1957 and 1966 configured everyday life as a ground of human existence and a resource for ethical enquiry. Through close readings of four novels – Michel Butor’s La Modification (1957), Georges Perec’s Les Choses (1965), Nathalie Sarraute’s Le Planétarium (1959), and Marguerite Duras’s Le Vice-Consul (1966) – the thesis argues for the significance of narrative fiction in the development of a conceptual history of everyday life, and particularly for its capacity to reflect on the conditions of possibility for thinking ethics through everydayness.
David's postdoctoral project will attempt to reckon with the significance of the postwar period (c. 1944–1981) in metropolitan France, not least as the historical foil against which the subsequent historical epoch has been understood. The project will investigate how an historically unprecedented set of conditions for living well emerged in relation to the transformation of longstanding structures of violence and exploitation. Through the close reading of literary fiction, the project aims to recover structures of feeling whose relation to major historico-philosophical concepts – optimism, solidarity, coloniality, alienation (e.g.) – challenge the historiographical commonplace according to which France experienced ‘thirty glorious years’ after the war, and to explore the implications for a critical understanding of the neoliberal era in the moment of its own supercession.
Publications
Book Chapters
- ‘Reading past rage: ugly feelings and the possibility of hope in Michel Houellebecq’s Sérotonine (2019)’ in Rage: Affect and Resistance in French and Francophone Culture and Thought, 1960–2020 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2024)
- ‘The everyday at the limits of representation: Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965)’ in Everydayness: Contemporary Aesthetic Approaches, eds. Lisa Giombini and Adrián Kvokačka (Rome and Presov: Roma Tre Press and Presov University Press, 2021)
Edited collections
- After Work/Après le travail’, double special issue of French Studies Bulletin, Spring 2024. Co-edited with Elly Walters.
- ‘Surroundings/Environs’, special issue of French Studies Bulletin, Spring 2025. Co-edited with Elly Walters.
Book Reviews
- Colin Davis, Literature, Interpretation and Ethics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2024), French Studies 79.2 (2025).
Conference Papers
- 'Individual, experience, structure: Chantal Jaquet's Transclasses between three paradigms of cultural studies', Society for French Studies Annual Conference, June 2025
- ‘Conceptual history and the experimental novel: the case of the quotidien in postwar France’, Society for French Studies Annual Conference, June 2023
- ‘Inter-stationary narrative: Michel Butor’s La Modification (1957) and the dialectics of everyday time in postwar France’, Society for French Studies Annual Conference, June 2021
- ‘Metaphor and its antitheses in Henri Lefebvre’s postcolonial imaginary’, Cambridge Modern French Research Seminar, February 2021
- ‘The everyday at the limits of representation: Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965)’, Art, Aesthetics, and the Philosophy of Everyday Life (Coordinates of Aesthetics, Art, and Culture Conference VI, Society for Aesthetics in Slovakia), 2020
- ‘“F*ck you, I would prefer not to”: ugly feelings and the politics of style in Michel Houellebecq’s recent fiction’, Rage Against the Machine (Cambridge French Graduate Conference), 2020
- ‘Planes, trains, and automatons?: Reading Michel de Certeau’s “pratiques d’espace” in the age of data’, Cambridge French Graduate Research Seminar, 2019
- ‘Is Michel Houellebecq the 21st century’s answer to Jean-Paul Sartre?’, St Hilda’s College Graduate Research Symposium, 2016
Contact
Queen's College