French Staff

My specialism is medieval French and Anglo-Norman language and literature. I have a particular interest in text editing and manuscript studies, and have worked in areas including comic and satirical literature, hagiography, and Apocalypse translations and commentaries.

As General Editor of the Complete Works of Voltaire, my main research interests are related to Voltaire, in particular his historical writings, his correspondence, his poetry, the Lettres philosophiques, and the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie. I am also interested in the French Enlightenment more generally, in the history of the book (in particular the illustrated book) and in questions of critical editing.

Tim Farrant’s main research interests centre on nineteenth-century prose narrative and literature and the visual arts. Recent work has included a general study on Balzac, papers on Hugo and Gautier, and Taylor and Nodier’s monumental topographical series, the Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France.

I work in the field of eighteenth-century literature and thought, with a particular interest in the ways in which authors create a public image of themselves, both in their lifetime and after their death.

Jane Hiddleston’s research interests include francophonel iterature, postcolonial theory and literary theory. She teaches all areas of nineteenth and twentieth century French and Francophone literature. 

My research interests are in the French novel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I have published books on narrative form in the contemporary novel and on crime fiction pastiche in literary and experimental fiction. I am currently working on the second volume of an academic trilogy and theories of consciousness and their relevance to representations of the mind in literature and film.

I am interested in literature, philosophy and film that can help us explore what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

My main research interests lie in the field of 20th-century French literature and philosophy, and particularly the relationship between those domains. I have published on writers and thinkers such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Samuel Beckett, Roger Laporte, and Jean-Luc Nancy, and on topics that include literary time, reading and the senses, the role of the imagination, and the responsibilities of the writer. Life writing is another interest of mine, as is reflected in my most recent book on the autobiographical works of Louis-René des Forêts.

Patrick McGuinness’s main research interests include 19th, 20th and 21st century French literature, especially Poetry and Theatre; French and Belgian Symbolism; Belgian Literature in French and Comparative Literature; Anglo-American Modernism,  modern poetry in English and modern and contemporary French poetry. He also has an interest in translation and translation studies.

Fellow and tutor in French, St Hugh’s College; Associate Professor of French and Francophone Literature

(Maîtrise, Paris VII; MA, Columbia University; MA, Princeton University; PhD, Princeton University and Paris-Sorbonne)

Ève Morisi’s research considers the interface of poetics, politics and ethics in French, Francophone, and comparative literature from the 19^th to the 21^st century. It analyzes some of the ways in which literary representations of violence and resistance engage critically with the notion and practice of justice and with socio-political forms of oppression, State power, and lethal law at key historical junctures. Modern French poetry is another area of interest.

Her archival research and several of her books have focused on Albert Camus. She has also worked on Hugo, Baudelaire, and contemporary Algerian Francophone writers. Her current project examines the figuration of terrorism in modern and contemporary French and Algerian Francophone fiction.

Helen Swift’s research interests straddle the late medieval and early modern periods, looking at the poetics of vernacular literature between 1330 and 1550. Her work is interdisciplinary, in that it often involves visual studies of text-image relationships, as well as studying the history of the book in this period of transition between manuscript and print cultures. She also integrates critical theory into her work as a tool for opening up new perspectives on earlier literature to modern readers. Her first book examined the literary and rhetorical structures of literary defences of women written by men in the period after Christine de Pizan. Her second book looked at questions of identity construction and narrative voice in late medieval France through the lens of literary epitaphs in response to the question: who am I when I am dead?

My work is mainly on French writing of the eighteenth century, in particular the work of the encyclopedist, Denis Diderot. This takes me into a wide range of areas such as philosophical materialism, æsthetics and art criticism, questions of anonymity and authorship, and the many disputes, controversies and querelles that animated the Enlightenment and continue to animate its historiography. 

Dr Watson’s research interests are in linguistics and phonetics, with special reference to French, especially the description of modern French phonetics and phonology. He also works with speech perception, prosody, and language acquisition, especially the acquisition of sound patterns.

Wes Williams’ main research interests are in the field of Renaissance and/or early modern literature; he has written a book on pilgrimage writing, and continues to explore travel narratives of various kinds across the period. He is now writing a book on monsters and their meanings from, roughly, Rabelais to Racine (by way of Shakespeare, Montaigne and a few others). He also works on European film, and in the theatre as a writer and director.