Staff Research Interests

Mr James Agar (link)
Modern and contemporary fiction; cultural discourses of AIDS, especially in the work of Hervé Guibert; cultural theory, especially the work of Foucault; cultural studies; gender studies, especially gay studies and queer theory; comparative literature, especially French and Hispanic writing; medical humanities, especially literature and medicine;contemporary gay/queer cinema.

Dr Jane Gilbert (link)

Medieval French and English literature, especially narrative; constructions of identity; Narcissus, mirrors, doubles and the uncanny; comparative literature; literary theory, especially gender, queer theory, anthropology, psychoanalysis.

Dr Azzedine Haddour (link)
Twentieth-century French literature and thought, post-colonial literature and theory.

Professor Mairéad Hanrahan (link)
Twentieth-century and contemporary writing, especially Genet and Cixous; literature in its relationship with philosophy, psychoanalysis and mathematics; literary critical theory, particularly in its feminist and poststructuralist forms; theories of reading; trauma theory.

Dr Katherine Ibbett (link)

Late sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature, cultural history, political thought. The novel, neoclassical theatre. Histories of affect and sentiment, with a special focus on compassion and fellow feeling. The seventeenth century in its relation to the civil wars of the sixteenth: memories of violence, community, toleration.

Dr Kevin Inston (link)

Eighteenth and twentieth-century literature and thought; Jean-Jacques Rousseau; Michel Leiris; autobiographical writing and its links with modern democracy; modern political philosophy, especially the work of Lefort, Laclau, Mouffe and Žižek; twentieth-century theories of the human (Blanchot, Nancy, Derrida, Lyotard and Butler).

Dr Roland-François Lack (link)
French film, particularly Godard, Cocteau, and early cinema; nineteenth-century poetry and poetics, particularly Lautréamont, Gautier and Baudelaire; francophone literature, particularly Ouologuem, Ramuz and Simenon.

Professor Andrew Leak (link)
Sartre and Existentialism; twentieth-century and contemporary French literature; Georges Perec and the OuLiPo; psychoanalysis.

Professor Philippe Marlière (link)

French politics; political parties notably the French Socialist party; political traditions; Citizenship, religion and laicite, French social movements; France and the European Union; Politics and collective memory; French sociology and social theory (notably Bourdieu, Durkheim, Halbwachs).

Professor Timothy Mathews (link)
Image, imagination, dissent; representations of identity in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and painting; Visual art and its relations to writing: Ernst, Magritte, Fautrier, Giacometti, Kitaj; Art and revolt; Art and witness;The legacies of Charles Baudelaire; nineteenth and twentieth-century French poetry; Apollinaire; Surrealism; Literary theories, theories of knowledge; Psychoanalysis and the reading process; Translation.

Dr Jann Matlock (link)
French literature, history, and visual representation, 1789-1914; comparative literary studies in French, German, and English; critical theory; gender studies; narrative and the novel.; realism in literature and art; history of psychoanalysis; film and video; the contemporary French and American media.

Dr Thibaut Maus de Rolley (link)

Renaissance literature and thought; comparative literary studies in French, Spanish, Italian and English; narrative fiction, and more particularly its interactions with knowledge and science; cosmic voyages and the imagination of alternative worlds; discourses on demons, magic, possession and witchcraft; travel writing, especially on America; literature and geography; conceptions and representations of space. 

Dr Isabelle Moreau (link)
Seventeenth-century literature and thought; History of ideas, with a special interest in libertinism and free-thinking.

The status of fiction in philosophy and literature in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Issues of fiction, rhetoric and make-believe in relation to intellectual history and science.

Eighteenth-century literature and thought (Diderot, the Encyclopédie, clandestine writing). Materialism in thought, literature, medicine and the emerging sciences 1600-1800. Representations of the Mind-Body Problem in Early Modern Europe. I have ongoing interests in the relation of literary to visual art.

Early Modern Travel narratives and post-colonial theories.

Professor Michael Worton (link)
Gender Studies, especially contemporary women's writing and theories and representations of masculinities; Literature and Art, especially photography; Literature and Medicine; Theory of Translation; Theory of Literature, especially in relation to metaphor and psychoanalysis; Michel Tournier; Contemporary Fiction; 19th and 20th century poetry.