Current Research in the Department of French Studies

  • The Department of French Studies at Warwick maintains a dual strategy of encouraging new work in traditional areas of literary, textual, and historical scholarship across a wide chronological range and promoting the development of original interdisciplinary work in established and emerging areas of French and francophone culture, society, and thought.
  • The Department has consistently been judged as one of the leading centres for research in French Studies in the UK. The most recent Research Assessment Exercise (RAE2008) ranked French Studies at Warwick joint second in the UK and judged 65% of our research as either world-leading or internationally excellent.
  • Research in the Department is closely related to the work of colleagues in other Departments or Centres at Warwick, including notably the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts, the Centre for the Study of Cultural Policy, the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, and the Centre for Caribbean Studies, and has been supported by a range of external funding bodies, including the British Academy, the AHRC, the Leverhulme Trust, the MHRA, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
  • Staff in the Department are members of the editorial or advisory boards of several leading journals, including French Studies, Paragraph, the International Journal of Cultural Policy, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, and Film-Philosophy.
  • Under the auspices of the MA for Research in French and Francophone Studies, the MA in French Culture and Thought, the MA in Translation, Writing, and Cultural Difference, together with the MA, MPhil, and PhD in French Studies, support for postgraduate work is an essential part of the Department’s research culture. In collaboration with its partners in the Universities of Reading and Southampton (other HEIs are expected to join shortly), the Department is a member of Réseau-F, a postgraduate consortium for French and Francophone Studies, designed to allow MA and doctoral students in French and francophone studies to share ideas, attend joint seminars and workshops, and organise joint research initiatives.

Staff in the Department are engaged in a variety of major research projects that are currently at different stages of development or completion.

In the fields of Medieval, Early-Modern, and eighteenth-century studies,

  • Dr Emma Campbell, with the support of an AHRC Fellowship to be held in 2012-13, is currently preparing a new monograph exploring how notions of translation and the untranslatable in Old French and Anglo-Norman texts offer critical insights into fundamental questions of language, identity and origin raised by postcolonial and translation theory. She is also working on a collaborative project on the ethics of medieval translation with colleagues in the US and the UK.
  • Professor Linda Paterson currently holds an AHRC research grant of over £400,000 to pursue a four-year Anglo-Italian collaborative project entitled ‘Lyric Responses to the Crusades in Medieval France and Occitania’. Together with a team of specialists from Royal Holloway, La Sapienza University in Rome, the University of Naples, the University of Salerno, the University of Palermo, and the Paul-Valéry University, Montpellier III, she will investigate the complex contemporary secular responses to medieval crusading movements, on the part of troubadours and trouvères, lyric poet-musicians composing in France, Occitania, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, Syria and Greece.
  • Dr Ingrid De Smet is preparing a critical edition (and translation into French) of Jacques-Auguste de Thou’s Latin didactic poem on falconry (the Hieracosophion) for the Bibliotheca cynegetica series, which will also include a study of the socio-cultural significance of falconry in Renaissance France. She is also a member of a research team editing an unpublished monograph by the late Ian McFarlane on Neo-Latin Poetry in Renaissance France and currently holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship and is engaged on a research project entitled 'Secrets and their keepers in Renaissance France, ca. 1560 – ca. 1620’.
  • Dr Michael Harrigan has recently completed two articles on the subject of métissage in the Indian Ocean Basin and on European theories of human mobility in the seventeenth century, and is currently preparing an extensive study on the historiography of the early modern period, focusing on the function and reception of short narratives (histoires).
  • Dr Kate Astbury has recently completed a book entitled Literary Responses to the Trauma of the French Revolution, forthcoming with Legenda in 2012, and is working on a new research project examining the theatre of the Napoleonic era, drawing on the resources of the University of Warwick Library’s special Marandet collection.

In the area of modern literature, philosophy, history and theory,

  • Professor Seán Hand recently completed a series of studies dealing with the writings of Emmanuel Levinas and with the fictional representation of issues of post-memory, and is currently preparing further work on Levinas and in the area of globalisation and governance.
  • Professor Leslie Hill FBA has recently completed a book on fragmentary writing in Maurice Blanchot and is researching a study of Pierre Klossowski’s reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return.
  • Dr Oliver Davis recently completed a critical introduction to the writings of the philosopher Jacques Rancière and is currently working on a three-year collaborative project, funded by the AHRC, examining queer theory in France today and its intercultural relationship with US and British queer theory.
  • Dr Sotirios Paraschas, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department, is currently working on a project entitled ‘Reappearing Characters: Originality and Property in Ideas in Nineteenth-Century France’.
  • Dr Susannah Wilson, British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department, is currently pursuing a new project, focusing on physically self-destructive behaviour, such as self-mutilation, anorexia/ bulimia, suicide, addiction, intoxication, and ritual self-harm (stigmata) on the part of nineteenth-century French women.

In contemporary French and francophone literature, film, and thought,

  • Dr Douglas Morrey, having already published on both Godard and Rivette, has recently completed a book on Michel Houellebecq and is embarking on a new project examining the cinematographic legacy of the French New Wave.
  • Dr Sam Haigh has published widely on aspects of women’s writing and francophone Caribbean literature and film, and is currently working on French national identity and representations of bodily difference, in particular representations of disability, in contemporary French and francophone fiction, film, and photography.
  • Dr Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, with the support of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, is currently preparing a monograph assessing the significance and intellectual influence of the Congolese novelist and philosopher Valentin Yves Mudimbe on postcolonial thought.

In French cultural politics, political thought, and history,

  • Professor Jerry Ahearne recently published a monograph dealing with relations between public intellectuals and culture-shaping policy processes in France, and is currently developing a study on strategies deployed by recent French governments to shape social cultures in France (notably in the areas of education, media, religion, and policies articulating national identity).
  • Professor Nick Hewlett has recently completed a book entitled The Sarkozy Phenomenon, and is currently working on a project dealing with the theory and practice of political violence in modern France and planning a study of the political economy of France in the post-Second World War era.
  • Dr Jessica Wardhaugh, following recent work exploring the battle between left and right to organise the people as political actors, is currently writing a monograph on the political uses of popular theatre between 1870 and 1940 and researching the development of right-wing satire in nineteenth and twentieth-century France.