Professor of French Studies

Profile

Professor Seán Hand is currently on sabbatical leave. From 2017-2023 he was seconded to be the first Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Europe) of the University of Warwick. In this capacity he was a founding Vice-President of the EUTOPIA European university alliance, provided intellectual and academic leadership to the University’s European engagements, and established and supported global partnerships. In 2022-23 he additionally chaired the Warwick-Ukraine Working Group. In 2016-17 he was Dean of Warwick in California. In 2014-16 he was Head of Warwick's then newly formed School of Modern Languages and Cultures. In 2008-2011 he was Head of the Department of French Studies. He joined the University of Warwick as a Professor of French Studies in 2005.

Professor Hand was made a Chevalier des Palmes Académiques in 2004. He is 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, a Scientific Advisory Board member at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, and an Associate Member of the Senior Common Room of Merton College, Oxford. He has been an Honorary Professor of Monash University, a Visiting Fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and a Visiting Professor at Wroclaw University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and the National University of Singapore. He has been Vice-Chair of the MSCA Individual Fellowships competition, and an assessor for the AHRC, the European Science Foundation, the Irish Research Council, the Israel Science Foundation, the Slovak Research and Development Agency, and the South African National Research Foundation. 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 antisemitic semiotics.

Academic interests

Seán Hand's teaching has covered literature, ideas and related developments from the early twentieth century to the present day, in both a French and a more international context. He invites applications to work with him at doctoral or post-doctoral level. His research examines writings in French of the past 100 years. He published the first two monographs in English on the autobiography, ethnography and criticism of Michel Leiris. He brought the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to a wider audience through translations, a Reader, a collection of critical essays, and a monograph. He edited and introduced a collection of new essays on post-Holocaust France and the Jews. He has also published on Derrida, Duras, Grimbert, Jabès, Lacan, Nancy, postmodernism, and Jewish writing and historiography; and translated into English a number of French-language philosophers, including Kristeva, Irigaray, and Deleuze. He is currently interested in ecosophical writings.

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.