The project follows literary rivers across texts from France and the Americas, thinking about those rivers as tributaries to a wider oceanic history. In exploring rivers from the Seine to the Senegal via the Mississippi, across a period of time from France’s earliest Atlantic ambitions to its codification of the slave trade, it asks how the small scale of riverbank writing paradoxically allows us to trace France’s expansionist poetics and politics. Substantial research for this project has already been carried out in libraries in the UK, France, the US and Canada, and most of the year has been devoted to drafting, with some periods of travel to Paris and St Louis for research.