French Staff
Statutory Professors
Professor Catriona Seth FBA
Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature
Literature, cultural history and the history of ideas of the long 18th-century.
Postholders
Dr Michaël Abecassis
Senior Lecturer in French
College Lecturer at Christ Church, University College and Wadham
Research
Michaël Abecassis’s research interests include applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, grammar, French cinema and francophone culture.
Dr Cécile Bishop
Associate Professor in Francopphone Post-Colonial Literatures & Cultures
Cécile’s research lies in the area of Francophone and Postcolonial Studies, with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and the French Caribbean. Her work explores the intersections between political issues and aesthetic representation across a variety of genres and media, including literature, social science, film and visual arts. After completing her PhD at King’s College London, Cécile joined Somerville College as a Junior Research Fellow in October 2012.
Her current book project examines the relationships between photography and humanism in the postcolonial context. This inquiry takes as its starting point the work realized by the French photographer Denise Comb in the Antilles in 1948 and 1958. Colomb’s work is usually situated within the aesthetic of French humanist photography, made famous by Robert Doisneau, which has produced some of the most iconic representations of France in the 20th century. This project concentrates on the various issues raised by Colomb’s transposition of this aesthetic to the Caribbean context, and particularly on the apparent tension between her emphasis on the ‘poetry of everyday-life’ and the difficult social and political situation of the French Antilles. In addition, through Colomb’s complicated collaboration with two influential writers, Aimé Césaire and Michel Leiris, the project examines how written and visual representations engage with the tension between political and aesthetic dimensions in different ways.
Research interests:
— Postcolonial and Francophone Literatures
— Photography
— Aesthetics
— Fiction and social science
Professor Daron Burrows
Professor of Medieval French, Fellow of St Peter’s College
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.
Professor Andrew Counter
Professor of Modern French Literature
Andrew Counter’s research considers the intersections of law, politics, sexuality and literature in France between the Revolution and the Great War. His work draws on a broad range of methodologies and considers multiple genres, including literary, legal, medical and political discourse, though he has a particular interest in the novel. His first book, Inheritance in Nineteenth-Century French Culture (Oxford: Legenda, 2010), was an interdisciplinary study of the use made by writers of fiction and non-fiction alike of the narratives, vocabulary and ideology of inheritance and property transmission. His second book, The Amorous Restoration: Love, Sex and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), explores the Bourbon Restoration (1814-30) as a period when discourses of love and sexuality provided an important vehicle for political discussion, and especially for the working through of post-revolutionary political resentments.
Prof N E Cronk
Professor of European Enlightenment Studies
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.
Dr T Farrant
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.
Dr Jessica Goodman
Associate Professor of French, Fellow of St Catherine's College
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.
Dr Michael Hawcroft
Michael Hawcroft’s research interest is seventeenth-century French drama, especially Molière and Racine.
Prof J Hiddleston
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.
Professor Katherine Ibbett
Professor of French, Fellow of Trinity College
Sixteenth and seventeenth century writing, emotion and affect, environmental humanities, the French Americas.
Dr S Kemp
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.
Prof M-C Killeen
Professor of French Literature, Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall
Marie-Chantal Killeen studied and taught in Canada, the U.S.A. and France before settling in Oxford in 2001 to take up a post at New College. She has been a French tutor at LMH since 2004.
Prof Nikolaj Lübecker
Professor of French and Film Studies, Fellow of St John's College
I am interested in literature, philosophy and film that can help us explore what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.
Dr K Lunn-Rockliffe
Faculty Lecturer in French, Fellow of Hertford College
Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe’s main research interests are in the field of nineteenth-century poetry. She has worked on Symbolism and is the author of a book on Tristan Corbière. Currently she is working on Romantic verse, in particular a study of progress in Victor Hugo’s poetry.
Prof I G Maclachlan
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.
Prof S Marnette
Sophie Marnette’s research offers a linguistic and philological approach of literary issues such as the origins and evolution of medieval literary genres, the expression of narrative voice and point of view, the relationship between history and fiction, female expression and literary genres, especially in 12th and 13th medieval French and Occitan literatures. She is particularly active in the field of Speech and Thought Presentation.
Patrick McGuinness
Patrick McGuinness’s main research interests include 19th and 20th century French literature, especially Poetry and Theatre; French and Belgian Symbolism; Belgian Literature in French and Comparative Literature; Anglo-American Modernism and modern poetry in English.
Emily McLaughlin
Emily McLaughlin grew up in Derry in Northern Ireland. She studied French and Spanish at Oxford University and completed her postgraduate studies at Royal Holloway and Oxford University.
Professor Ève Morisi
Associate Professor of French, Fellow of St Hugh’s College
Ève Morisi’s research examines the interface of poetics, politics and ethics in French, Francophone, and comparative literature from the 19th to the 21st century. Several of her projects have focused on the ways in which literary representations of extreme violence and resistance have engaged critically with socio-political forms of oppression, State power, and lethal law at critical historical junctures.
Hugo and Baudelaire have been of particular interest for the 19th century; Camus and Algerian Francophone writers for the 20th and 21st centuries.
Dr E M J Nye
In the past, I have mainly focused on aesthetic theories of literature, the aesthetics of stage dance, and the theatrical, literary and cultural impact of mime in the nineteenth century. My current research lies in Deaf Studies, notably the history of sign language, the change of attitude to the deaf in the eighteenth century which constitutes one of the greatest social, cultural and philosophical legacies of the Enlightenment, and the subsequent significance of Deaf Culture in literature and the arts.
Professor Helen J Swift
Professor of Medieval French Studies, Fellow of St Hilda's College
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?
Dr R Temple
Ros Temple’s research interests lie in the areas of phonetics/phonology and variationist linguistics and the interface between the two, particularly the implications of variability in fine phonetic detail for both phonetic/phonological and variationist theory. She has worked on these topics with reference particularly to French, English and Welsh.
Professor Dr Kate E Tunstall
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.
Professor Caroline Warman
Professor of French Literature and Thought, Fellow of Jesus College
I work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French writing, and have published on Diderot and Sade, and on aspects of literary, cultural and medical history. I have translated a number of works by Diderot, Isabelle de Charrière, and others. I teach across this broad area.
Dr I M C Watson
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.
Prof Seth Whidden
Professor of French Literature, Fellow of The Queen's College
Seth Whidden’s research interests are in French literature of the nineteenth century. His work has focused in particular on poetry, and on questions of subjectivity, authority, collaboration, and parody. He is also the editor of the scholarly journal Nineteenth-Century French Studies.
Prof W Williams
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.
Professor Sam Wolfe
Professor of French and Romance Linguistics, Tutor and Fellow of St Catherine's
My main research interests are syntactic variation and change in the history of French, Gallo-Romance, and Italo-Romance, and a range of topics in formal syntax. I have published on the historical syntax of French, Occitan, Venetian, Italian, Sicilian, and Sardinian.
Prof. Jennifer Yee
https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/56056/My research interests include Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Zola, colonial and ‘exotic’ writing, Proust, art history, and francophone writing. See also Twitter @Yee_Jenn
Statutory Professor of the Romance Languages
Prof Martin D Maiden
Professor of the Romance Languages, Fellow of Trinity College
Martin Maiden’s principal research interests are in the field of the history of the Romance languages (with particular attention to inflexional morphology and dialectology), general historical linguistics, general morphological theory. While the main focus of his attention is Italo-Romance and Daco-Romance (Romanian), he maintains strong interests in French, Spanish, Dalmatian, Romansh and other Romance languages.
Departmental Lecturers
Dr Jennifer Oliver
Departmental Lecturer in French, Worcester College
My research is centred on sixteenth-century French literature, culture, and thought, and I teach across the early modern period and beyond. My first book, Shipwreck in French Renaissance Writing: The Direful Spectacle, was published by OUP in 2019.
Dr J Patterson
I am a Departmental Lecturer in French. I teach French language and literature, with a particular focus on the period of my research: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My work explores how literature interacts with broader cultural forces of early modern society: morality, law, bureaucracy, and economics.
College Fellows and Lecturers
Dr Marie Kawthar Daouda
Stipendiary Lecturer in French
Marie Kawthar Daouda is a lecturer at Oriel college. Her research focuses on the links between aesthetic theory, religion, and politics in the broad 19th century. She teaches literature (period papers and special authors) and translation (Prose and Unseen).
Dr Christophe Barnabé
Stipendiary Lecturer in French, New College & Merton College
Christophe Barnabé’s research broadly includes 20th and 21st century French literature, especially poetry, as well as modern poetry in Spanish and English written on both sides of the Atlantic. He is particularly interested in the study of literary discourse as a means to dismantle traditional dichotomies opposing art and knowledge, magic and science, or rational and irrational modes of thinking.
Dr C Bateman
Stipendiary Lecturer in French, Lady Margaret Hall and University College
- My main research interests lie in medieval and early modern French literature, and in challenging the conventional distinction between them. As my postgraduate training was in Comparative Literature (French, Classics and Italian), I have a keen enthusiasm for working across national boundaries as well as chronological ones. My areas of specialty are literature and gender, courtly and erotic literature, and the influence of classical antiquity on medieval and early modern Europe.
Dr Carole J.A. Bourne-Taylor
Associate Professor of French, Fellow of Brasenose College
Carole Bourne-Taylor’s interests include comparative literature (French and English, Literature and Music); contemporary French poetry & poetics; and critical theory (in particular, phenomenology).
She is currently writing a book on the writer and drama critic Charles Langbridge Morgan .
Teaching: XIXth-XXIth C. French Literature; prose & grammar
Dr S Goddard
Stephen Goddard’s main research interests are in the field of the 19th-century French novel, especially Flaubert’s work. His doctoral thesis was on the influence of classical literature upon Flaubert, and he is working on adapting that thesis into various papers, articles and other publications. Dr Goddard also has an interest in, and has lectured on, the reception of classical tragedy in 20th-century French drama.
Dr B Jack
Belinda Jack’s main research interests are in Francophone Writing, Women’s Writing, Biography and Reading.
Dr Holly Langstaff
I’m interested in modern and contemporary literature and thought. My research to date has focused on the work of Maurice Blanchot.
Dr K Rees
Kate Rees’s research interests include the work of Flaubert, the nineteenth century novel, ideas of progress and dynamism in literature, decadent writing and connections between the literature of the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, e.g. between Huysmans and Houellebecq.
Dr Alice Roullière
Supernumerary Teaching Fellow St John's College
Dr Alice Roullière is an early career research and teaching fellow (Supernumerary Teaching Fellow) at St John’s College. She teaches early modern French literature from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century (Paper X and VII) and first-year literature papers.
Dr Macs Smith
Career Development Fellow in French, Queen's CollegeCollege Profile
My primary research interest is the relationship between technology, communication, the body, and collective politics. I focus in particular on how metaphors of disease (media parasites, viral media, smartphone addiction) govern the way we think about new communication technologies.
Ms A Violet
My main research interests lie in the fields of corpus linguistics, contrastive linguistics (French-English), phraseology, Construction Grammar and language attitudes. I am particularly interested in linguistic phenomena at the interface between lexis and grammar, and my doctoral thesis, which was a corpus-based investigation of determination in certain French and English prepositional phrases, drew on insights from recent phraseological and constructional work in order to shed light on a problem that had, until then, primarily been treated as purely grammatical. I am also interested in the semantics of prepositions and adverbials, and in discourse markers and connectives. I am currently working on my first book project, which expands on the findings of my doctoral research. My next research projects focus on foreign language teaching (phraseodidactics) and computer-mediated communication (prescriptivism in online interactions).
Dr Amina Zarzi
Stipendiary Lecturer in French, Somerville College
AFHEA, PhD in French and Francophone Studies, University of Birmingham.
Teaching
Research Fellows/Researchers
Dr Suzanne Jones
Kathleen Bourne Junior Research Fellow in French, St Anne's College
Research
Prof N Kenny
Professor of French, University of Oxford; Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College
My research mostly focuses on early modern French literature and thought, especially from the early sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. Its current focus is on the relation of literature and learning to social hierarchy.
I am Lead Fellow for Languages at the British Academy. This involves work on language policy within education and society.
Dr Emilija Talijan
Junior Research Fellow at St John's College
Emilija Talijan is a research fellow working at the intersection of French and Film Studies at St. John’s College, Oxford. Her research focusses on cinema, sound, technology and the body.
Professor Valerie Worth
My research focuses on early modern French literature and history (c. 1500-1700), the history of medicine, and translation studies.
Junior Research Fellows
Dr Ruggero Sciuto
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Ruggero Sciuto is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and a fellow of St Edmund Hall.
Retired Postholders
Prof R A Cooper
Emeritus Professor of French
Professor Cooper’s research interests are French Renaissance literature; relations between France and Italy in the Renaissance; Court Festivals; Renaissance antiquarians; Renaissance manuscript painting.
Dr J S T Garfitt
Associate Professor of French
Toby Garfitt works mainly on French literature between the two world wars, with a special interest in Catholic writing (Mauriac, La Tour du Pin) and non-metropolitan literature. He has supervised theses on Gide, Camus, and Francophone literature from Africa, the Caribbean, and Vietnam, and runs a regular Francophone seminar. Recent books include a biography of Jean Grenier, the philosopher and essayist who was the mentor of Albert Camus; French Catholic intellectuals in the interwar years; and French and British literary responses to the First World War. He is now working on the contemporary novelist and essayist Sylvie Germain. Translation studies is another area of interest.
A R Goodden
Emeritus Professor of French
Dr Goodden’s main research interests are in 18th- and 19th-century French literature (especially Diderot, Rousseau, and a range of women writers) and culture, particularly painting. She is currently working on Rousseau and the problem of writing.
Dr M B Holland
Emeritus Professor of French
Michael Holland’s main research area is the work of Maurice Blanchot. This entails more generally an interest in French literature and thought from 1848 onwards, and in French politics since 1870. In addition, he has done research in the field of avant-garde theatre since late nineteenth century, from Jarry and Mallarmé to Ionesco.
Prof C M Howells
Emeritus Professor of French
Christina Howells’s research work centres on Continental philosophy, literary theory, and twentieth-century French literature. She is particularly interested in post-war French thought, for example Sartre, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Foucault, Levi-Strauss and Levinas. She has also published with Routledge a Reader of articles by twenty-eight contemporary French women philosophers. Her latest monograph explores ideas of subjectivity and mortality in late twentieth-century French thought, and, together with Gerald Moore, she has recently co-edited a collection of essays on Bernard Stiegler for EUP .
Dr A B Hunt
Emeritus Professor of French
Dr Hunt’s interests are: the use of French in medieval England; medieval medicine; and editing Old French texts.
Ann Jefferson
Emeritus Professor of French
Ann Jefferson’s biography of Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999) was published by Flammarion in a French translation by Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat and Aude de Saint-Loup in 2019. The English version (Princeton University Press) came out in 2020.
Prof I W F Maclean
Honorary Faculty Research Fellow
Professor Maclean’s main research interests are in the fields of Montaigne; Cardano; history of the book in the late Renaissance; history of law, medicine and theology in European universities; and Aristotelianism.
Prof G J Mallinson
Emeritus Professor of French
Jonathan Mallinson works on French theatre and prose fiction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He has a special interest in comedy, prose fiction, women’s writing, and in the reception of canonical neo-classical writers in the Enlightenment. Current research projects include a critical edition of Voltaire’s Lettres d’Amabed, and a book on the seventeenth-century French novel.
D W Maskell
University Lecturer
Dr David Maskell specialises in combining the academic and practical aspects of theatre studies in Classics and Modern Languages, and African and Caribbean theatre in French. He has translated or adapted the following into English verse for performance in Oxford:
ANCIENT GREEK. Sophocles, Oedipus the King; Euripides, Bacchae (also performed at the International Youth Drama festival in Ancient Olympia, Greece in 2015)
LATIN. Ovid, Metamorphoses.
FRENCH. Le Jeu d’Adam; La Châtelaine de Vergi; Racine, Esther; Voltaire, Mahomet and Zaïre.
ITALIAN. Poliziano, Orfeo; Ariosto, Orlando Furioso.
He has a special interest in African and Caribbean theatre in French and has collaborated with the Oxford Francophone theatre group in adaptations of Une Saison au Congo by Aimé Césaire, and of plays about Shaka Zulu by Léopold-Sédar Senghor, Seydou Badian Kouyaté, and Senouvou Agbota Zinsou.
His publications on theatrical performance and cross-cultural representation include:
Racine: A Theatrical Reading (Oxford, OUP, 1991)
‘Racine and Shakespeare : a common language’, Comparative Literature Studies, 30 (1993), 253-268.
‘Tragédie et théâtralité dans la Psyché de Molière’, Le Nouveau Moliériste, 3 (1996-1997)
‘Orientalism subverted in Racine’s Bérénice and Bajazet’, in Eastern voyages, Western visions, ed. M. Topping (Oxford, Bern, New York: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 91-112.
Prof Roger Pearson
Emeritus Professor of French; Emeritus Fellow of The Queen's College
My research interests lie in the field of French literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My research has focused in particular, and at different times, on the works of Voltaire, Stendhal, Zola, Maupassant, and Mallarmé. From 2009 to 2011 I held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a project entitled ‘Moses or Orpheus? The Poet as Lawgiver in Nineteenth-Century French Literature’, in which I set out to examine how poets and writers envisaged the role of the poet and the nature and function of the ‘poetic’ during the period. My book Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France: Chateaubriand-Staël-Lamartine-Hugo-Vigny was published by Oxford University Press in April 2016, and I am now working on a sequel, to include discussion of Nerval, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Laforgue, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, among others.
A E Pilkington
University Lecturer
Anthony Pilkington’s main research interests are in French Romantic writing.
Professor C F Robinson
University Lecturer
Professor Robinson’s research interests were women writers, particularly in the period 1870-1930, homosexuality and 20th century literature, and French-Canadian literature.
Mr John Charles Smith
Associate Professor of French Linguistics
JC Smith’s main field of interest is historical morphosyntax, and he has published widely on agreement, refunctionalization, deixis, and the evolution of case and pronoun systems, with particular reference to Romance, although he has also worked on other language families, including Germanic and Austronesian. He is Secretary of the International Society for Historical Linguistics, and is currently co-editing the Cambridge History of the Romance Languages. He is Co-Investigator (with Professor Martin Maiden) on the AHRC-funded research project ‘Autonomous morphology in diachrony: comparative evidence from the Romance languages’.
Dr A J Tooke
University Lecturer
Adrianne Tooke’s interests include Flaubert, especially travel writing and connections with the visual arts. Also Benjamin Constant in the early 1800s and nineteenth-century literature of all kinds, especially the novel and prose poetry.
In Memoriam
Ms G Adams
Lecturer in French at St Anne’s College and St Hugh’s College
Address: St Anne’s College, Woodstock Road, Oxford
Email: genevieve.adams@st-annes.ox.ac.uk
Prof R J Parish
Emeritus Professor of French
Richard Parish passed away on 1 January 2022.
Richard Parish has worked on French seventeenth-century theatre (Racine: the limits of tragedy, 1993; editions of Bérénice, Phèdre, Le Tartuffe), comic fiction, and in particular on the writing of, or associated with, the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In addition to a book on the Lettres Provinciales (Pascal’s Lettres Provinciales: a study in polemic, 1989) and editions of La Bruyère (Dialogues sur le Quiétisme) and Voltaire / Condorcet (Eloge et Pensées de Pascal), he has recently published in book form the Bampton lectures which he delivered in 2009 (Catholic particularity in seventeenth-century France: Christianity is strange, 2011). He has recently worked on the Mémoires of Saint-Simon.
Prof A Viala
Emeritus Professor of French
Alain Viala passed away on 30th June 2021. His main research was in the field of French Literature and Literary Theory.
