French Research

• 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.

BA Spanish Philology, BA Italian Philology, M.A. Romance Philology, PhD Spanish Philology (University of Barcelona)

Professor Cooper’s research interests are French Renaissance literature; relations between France and Italy in the Renaissance; Court Festivals; Renaissance antiquarians; Renaissance manuscript painting.

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.

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.

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. 

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 .

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.

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. 

I’m interested in modern and contemporary literature and thought. My research to date has focused on the work of Maurice Blanchot.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 19^th century; Camus and Algerian Francophone writers for the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

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.

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.

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.

Ruggero Sciuto is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and a fellow of St Edmund Hall.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.