Research Interests

Dr Glynn Hesketh is the editor of a 3-volume Anglo-Norman theological encyclopaedia, La Lumere as Lais, and has worked on other Old French theological and encyclopaedic texts (La Disme de Penitanche by Jehan de Journi, Rossignos by John of Howden). He also works in linguistics and has supervised (jointly with English) a PhD thesis on accommodation theory in conversational analysis. He would welcome research projects in mediaeval French language and literature, in the history of the French language, or in linguistics.

Professor Nadia Kiwan has an academic background in French Studies and Sociology, and works in the field of contemporary Francophone studies. She specialises in issues related to citizenship, migration, contemporary political culture and cultural production in contemporary France, particularly among North African-origin populations. Her recent publications include Cultural Globalization and Music: African Artists in Transnational Networks (co-authored with Ulrike Hanna Meinhof, Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and Identities, Discourses and Experiences: Young People of North African Origin in France (Manchester University Press 2009). She would welcome research projects in areas relating to migration, transnationalism, citizenship, new social movements, political discourse, cultural/audio-visual arts policy, and post-colonial cultural production in France.

Dr Áine Larkin’s first book Proust Writing Photography: Fixing the Fugitive in ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ was published by Legenda in 2011. Together with text/image relations, particularly in relation to photography, her research interests include literature and medicine, critical disability studies, the literary representation of music and dance, and contemporary women’s writing in French, and she would welcome research projects in any of these fields.

Dr Clémence O'Connor’s research interests lie in modern and contemporary French poetry, the dialogue between poetry and the visual arts (theories of the gaze, ekphrasis and new forms of art writing, colour, writing abstraction...), women's writings, place and memory studies, the interface between poetry and the philosophy of language and translation. Her recent work explores how contemporary French poetry relates to science and environmental concerns.

Dr Bruno Tribout would welcome research projects on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature and culture, particularly in areas relating to literature and history; life-writing; historiography and historical cultures; and the interface between literature and political thought.

Professor Edward Welch’s research focuses on the cultural history of post-war France, including literature, film and photography. His first book examined the post-war career of François Mauriac, his transformation from novelist to intellectual, and his unlikely collaboration with L’Express in the 1950s. His second book, co-authored with Dr Joseph McGonagle (University of Manchester) investigated the representation of the Franco-Algerian relationship in visual culture. His current project is on spatial planning, urban life and modernisation in post-war France. It explores the visions of the future imagined by state planners, and brings them into dialogue with responses to spatial transformation in literature, film and photography. Professor Welch would be keen to hear from postgraduate students interested in any of his research interests, including Franco-Algerian relations, photography in France, intellectual life in France, and the representation of cities, space and urban life.