Professor Seán Hand

Seán Hand is a Professor of French Studies, and in 2025-26 is additionally acting as Director of Research for the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. From 2017-2023 he was Warwick's first Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Europe) . As a founding Vice-President of the EUTOPIA European university alliance, he provided academic leadership to European engagements and global partnerships. In 2022-23 he chaired a Warwick-Ukraine Working Group. In 2016-17 he was Dean of Warwick in California. In 2014-16 he was the first Head of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. In 2008-2011 he was Head of the Department of French Studies. He joined Warwick as a Professor of French Studies in 2005.

Professor Hand is a Chevalier des Palmes Académiques, a member of the Academia Europaea, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is an Honorary Professorial Fellow of Zhejiang University, and a Visiting Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He has been an Associate Member of the Senior Common Room of Merton College, Oxford, a Visiting Fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, an Honorary Professor of Monash University, and a Visiting Professor at Wroclaw University and at the National University of Singapore. He has been Vice-Chair of the MSCA Individual Fellowships competition, a Scientific Advisory Board member at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, and an assessor for the AHRC, the European Science Foundation, the Irish Research Council, the Israel Science Foundation, the Slovak Research and Development Agency, the South African National Research Foundation, and Universities UK International. He supports a number of social mobility foundations and arts charities. In 2014 he acted as an expert witness for the Football Association in relation to a number of tribunals concerning anti-semitic semiotics.

Seán Hand's teaching has covered literature, ideas and related developments from the early twentieth century to the present day, in French and international contexts. His research examines writings in French of the past 100 years. He has published monographs on Michel Leiris and Emmanuel Levinas, and edited a collection of essays on post-Holocaust France and the Jews. He has also published on thinkers and writers such as Derrida, Duras, Grimbert, Jabès, Lacan, and Nancy, and translated a number of French-language philosophers, including Kristeva, Irigaray, and Deleuze.

Qualifications

MA DPhil Oxf | MBA DLitt Warwick

Recent publications

• 2014 Chinese edition of Emmanuel Levinas, Chongqing, Chongqing University Press, ISBN-10: 7562484198, ISBN-13: 978-7562484196.
• 2014 Kindle/ebook edition of Facing the Other. The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas.
• 2014 ‘Speech and Silence: Levinas and the Postwar Refounding of Ethics’, Levinas Studies, 9, 183-201.
• 2014 ‘Emmanuel Levinas’, in M. Kelly et al. (eds), Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, volume 4, pp. 194-97. ISBN hardback 0199747105.
• 2015: Seán Hand and Steven T. Katz (eds), Post-Holocaust France and the Jews, 1945-1955, New York, New York University Press, 256 pp., hardback 9781479835041, and kindle edition B00YDDKGSQ. Introduction pp. 1-25.
• 2016: Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom. Essays on Judaism, a translation, with glossary, further reprint (previously 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015), Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, xiv + 306 pp., ISBN 080185783X.
• 2017: Alter Ego. The Critical Writings of Michel Leiris, London, Routledge, Kindle edition B078579K4T of Oxford, Legenda, ix + 143 pp. ISBN 1 900755 98 X.
• 2019: 'Levinas, Literature, and Philosophy', in M. L. Morgan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Levinas, Oxford, Oxford University Press, chapter 26, pp. 529-48, ISBN-10 0190455934, ISBN-13 978-0190455934. Online DOI: 0.1093/oxfordhb/9780190455934.013.51, ebook / kindle edition ASIN B07QC86FFD.
• 2019: ‘Inoperative Governance, or the “democracy to come”: Jacques Derrida’s Voyous’, in C. Davis and O. Davis (eds), Freedom and the Subject of Theory: Essays in Honour of Christina Howells, Oxford, Legenda, pp. 76-88, hardback 978-1-781887-33-2, paperback (2020) 978-1-781887-34-9, JSTOR ebook 978-1-781887-81-3.
• 2019: 'Academic cooperation in Europe', interview, Hermes, La Revue, (CNRS Editions), 85, 143-48.
• 2021: 'French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK', review article, Style, 55.2, 287-93.
• 2021: 'Futures of Life Death: Derrida's seminar, and general ecology', review article, Style, 55.3, 466-72.
• 2022: 'Being for every other: Levinas in the Anthropocene', Frontiers of Narrative Studies, 7.2 (2021), 156-75.
• 2023: Seán Hand and Steven T. Katz (eds), Post-Holocaust France and the Jews, 1945-1955, New York, New York University Press, 256 pp., new kindle edition B00YDDKGSQ. Introduction pp. 1-25.
• 2023: 'Literary and Critical Encounters with the Anthropocene', Frontiers of Narrative Studies, 9.1 (2023), 1-13.
• 2023: ‘Jacques Derrida, Hospitalité. Volume II. Séminaire (1996–1997)’, review article, Derrida Today, 16.2 (2023), pp. 185-90.