French Research
Researchers
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 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 Diana Berruezo-Sánchez
Honorary Research Fellow
BA Spanish Philology, BA Italian Philology, M.A. Romance Philology, PhD Spanish Philology (University of Barcelona)
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
Dr M B Holland
University Lecturer in 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 B Jack
Belinda Jack’s main research interests are in Francophone Writing, Women’s Writing, Biography and Reading.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
Prof G J Mallinson
Emeritus Professor of French
Jonathan Mallinson has worked on French theatre and prose fiction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a special interest in comedy, prose fiction, women’s writing, and Enlightenment readings of canonical neo-classical texts. In retirement he has published research on the decorative arts, notably on British art pottery and its reception.
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, medieval intertextuality and intratextuality, and gendered discourse strategies in medieval narratives, 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, 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.
Waqas Mirza
Lecturer & DPhil Candidate
French and English Literature of the 20th Century
Professor Ève Morisi
Associate Professor of French, Fellow of St Hugh’s College
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 19th to the 21st 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.
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.
Dr Jennifer Oliver
Departmental Lecturer in French, Worcester College
I work mostly on sixteenth-century French literature, culture, and thought, and I teach across the early modern period and quite widely beyond. In my current book project Mineral Matters: Early Modern Literature, Stone, and Metal, I am interested in how early modern writers and craftspeople contemplated the connections and tensions between poetics, craft/technique, and the natural environment.
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.
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. I am an enthusiastic supporter of modern language outreach activities, and I advise civil servants on UK Language Policy initiatives.
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.
Matt Phillips
Stipendiary Lecturer in French at Trinity Collegeand Wadham College
Research
My research interests range across modern and contemporary French literature, culture and thought; theories of emotion, affect and mental health; the medical humanities; and debates surrounding the uses of literature.
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 Ruggero Sciuto
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Ruggero Sciuto is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and a fellow of St Edmund Hall.
Professor Catriona Seth FBA
Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature
Literature, cultural history and the history of ideas of the long 18th-century.
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 Macs Smith
Career Development Fellow in French, Queen's CollegeCollege Profile
Broadly I am interested in the ephemeral in contemporary French culture and in the intersections between media and the body. My primary focuses are the city (urban biopolitics, street art, the aesthetics of protest) and theatre (the corporeal experience of the actor, screens on stage, liveness).
Professor Helen J Swift
Professor of Medieval French Studies
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.
Dr Cosmin Toma
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
My primary research interests lie in the areas of postwar and contemporary French literature, literary theory and aesthetics, with an emphasis on deconstruction and its precipitates.
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.
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.
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.
Professor Valerie Worth
My research focuses on early modern French literature and history (c. 1500-1700), the history of medicine, and translation studies.
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
