Research in French and Francophone Literatures and Cultures at Oxford
The French sub-faculty is the largest hub of research into the literatures and cultures of the French-speaking world in the United Kingdom, and a very vibrant one too. Its traditional strengths in modernist and early modern literature are complemented by dynamic research in medieval and contemporary francophone literatures and cultures. Our research is international and collaborative, interdisciplinary and transhistorical; it contributes to both the dissemination of French and Francophone cultures through rigorous and innovative philological and editorial practices, and to the emergence of new critical paths and perspectives. It has been funded by the ARHC, the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and has resulted in exhibitions, prize-winning editions (including digital, fully open access ones) and research monographs (including fully open-access ones).
At a glance
Linguistics
Martin Maiden researches the history of the Romance languages, especially word-endings and dialectal variations, While his main focus is Italo-Romance and Romanian, he maintains strong interests in French, Spanish and other Romance languages.
Rosalind Temple is a specialist of phonology and phonetics and variationist linguistics (how words are pronounced and heard, and how these change in dialects), with particular reference to French, English and Welsh.
Ian Watson researches modern French phonetics and phonology, with a particular emphasis on speech perception and the acquisition of sound patterns.
Sam Wolfe investigates the nature of grammatical variation, acquisition and change in the Romance languages, especially French, Occitan and Spanish, and researches the ways in which Latin changed into the Romance languages spoken today.
Medieval Period
Daron Burrows is a specialist of medieval French satirical literature and manuscript culture as well as a philologist and editor of weird and wonderful lesser-known medieval texts. He currently investigates Anglo-Norman texts as well as the history of medieval philology.
Sophie Marnette uses linguistics and philology to address literary problems in medieval literature such as the origin and evolutions of literary genres, narrative voice and perspective, the relationship between history and fiction and gendered discourse strategies.
Helen Swift is a specialist of text-image relationships and the transition from manuscript to print between the medieval and early modern period. Her research examines narrative and rhetorical strategies of identity construction; she is currently working on the figure of guides and the notion of guidance in late medieval French texts.
Early Modern Period
Raphaële Garrod works at the intersection of intellectual history, history of science and early modern literature and currently investigates the ways in which medical, legal and theological understandings of animation and chance inform sixteenth-century anthropology and poetics.
Neil Kenny researches early modern French literature, culture, and thought, especially from the early sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. He is currently investigating the relation of literature and learning to social hierarchy.
Wes Williams works in the field of Renaissance and early modern literature. A specialist of travel narratives, he has written on pilgrimage and on monsters from Rabelais to Racine. He is currently exploring the notion of voluntary servitude. He is also a theatre writer and director.
Michael Hawcroft’s research focuses on XVIIth-century French drama, especially Molière and Racine, with a special emphasis on rhetorical efficacy and performance.
Katherine Ibbett works on the politics and poetics of early modern literature and culture. A specialist of affect theory, she is currently investigating the intersections between the poetics of water (especially rivers) and the construction of the early modern French empire.
Nicholas Cronk is general editor of the Complete Works of Voltaire and founder of the Voltaire foundation at Oxford; his research investigates everything Volaire wrote, his networks and more broadly the Enlightenment.
Jessica Goodman is a socio-historian of French literature and thought in the long eighteenth century. Her research examines the ways in which authors create a public image of themselves, both in their lifetime and after their death.
Edward Nye is a specialist of the aesthetics of literature, stage and dance in the long eighteenth century; he has written extensively on mime and ballet and is currently researching changes of attitude to the deaf in the eighteenth century and their lasting legacy.
Kate Tunstall is a specialist of eighteenth-century literary history with a particular emphasis on Diderot. She researches literary materiality, the act of publication, querelles, anonymity and pseudonymity. Her current project focuses on Julie de Lespinasse’s manuscript miscellany.
Catriona Seth is Marshal Foch professor of French literature. A specialist of literature, cultural history and the history of ideas, she has written extensively on life-writing by women, on intimacy and on creolité in the long eighteenth century.
Modern and Contemporary French and Francophone period
Tim Farrant’s research focuses on the XIXth century prose narrative and visual arts; he is a specialist of Balzac, Gautier and Nodier.
Andrew Counter examines the intersection of law, politics, sexuality and literature in France between the Revolution and the Second World War. He has written extensively on the social and sexual politics of nineteenth-century French fiction and non-fiction.
Jennifer Yee investigates colonial and ‘exotic’ writing and the visual arts in the long nineteenth century, as well as francophone writing. She has researched extensively orientalist, imperialist and racialised construction in the realist novel.
Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe examines nineteenth-century poetry, especially Tristan Corbière. She is currently working on the interplay between Romantic verse and the idea of progress in Victor Hugo’s poetry and, more generally on the poetics of ideas in verse form in nineteenth-century poetry.
Seth Whidden is a specialist of modern French literature, especially poetry from the nineteenth century to the present, whose research focuses on questions of subjectivity, authority, collaboration, parody, and form. His current project investigates the mediated voice in poetry.
Patrick McGuinness’s research focuses on French literature from the 19th to the 21st century, 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 is working on a study of literature and noticing.
Ian Maclachlan examines the relationship between 20th-century French literature and philosophy and has worked on literary time, reading and the senses, the role of the imagination, and the responsibilities of the writer. He is currently researching modern and contemporary ‘Life Poetry’ in French.
Emily McLaughlin researches contemporary French and Francophone poetry from an ecocritical and ecological perspective. She explores the ways in which poets decentre the human and interrogates its status through literary and thought experiments.
Nikolaj Lübecker investigates trough eco- and techno-critical lenses literature, philosophy and film which explore what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. A specialist of Symbolist poetry and of film studies, he currently works on political violence in documentary films, and on the emergence of the world as a coherent (often cognisant) system in contemporary film, fiction and cultural theory.
Reidar Due is a specialist of contemporary French thought (especially Deleuze) and researched theories of the cinematic image.
Carole Bourne-Taylor is a comparatist scholar of modernism whose research interests include the relationship between music and poetry, poetics and ethics, phenomenology and life writing.
Simon Kemp researches the French novel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and is currently working on the second volume of an academic trilogy on theories of consciousness and their relevance to representations of the mind in literature and film.
Marie-Chantal Killeen is a specialist of post-war narrative fiction. Her work has focused on 20th- and 21st-century female authors, contemporary life writing, modern French theatre as well as Québécois literature and cinema. She currently investigates contemporary confessional genres across media.
Eve Morisi investigates the interface of poetics, politics and ethics in French, Francophone and comparative literature from the 19th to the 21st centuries, focusing on representations of violence and resistance. She currently researches the critique and figuration of terrorism in French and Algerian Francophone fiction and non-fiction.
Cécile Bishop investigates the construction of racial representations in postcolonial Caribbean and Sub-Saharan African Literatures in French as well as in photography.
Jane Hiddleston focuses on francophone post-colonial literature in its relation to literary theory and philosophy–most recently in the works of Assia Djebar and Franz Fanon. She is currently researching Aimé Césaire.
For more information on our research, visit our staff list.