Research in French Studies
We maintain 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.
Staff in French Studies are members of the editorial or advisory boards of leading journals and book series, including Modern and Contemporary France, French HIstory, The International Journal of Cultural Policy, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, Renaissance Studies and Film-Philosophy.
We meet to discuss research in the Warwick Seminar for Interdisciplinary French StudiesLink opens in a new window, as well as in many other seminar series across the university.
Support for postgraduate work is essential to our research culture. Students share ideas, attend seminars and benefit from joint research initiatives through the Centre for Arts Doctoral Research Excellence, and the Humanities Research Centre.
Colleagues' research has been supported by a range of external funding bodies, including the British Academy, AHRC, The Leverhulme Trust, Modern Humanities Research Association and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In 2021-22, French Studies hosts 10 PhD students. Current and recent postdoctoral researchers have been funded by the British Academy, the MHRA, the EU Maria Skłodowska-Curie programme, the Newton International Fund, and the AHRC.
Research areas
- Medieval literature and culture
- Renaissance, early modern, and 18th-century studies
- Literature, culture and society in the long 19th century (1789–1914)
- Cultural memory (especially postcolonial and transnational)
- Contemporary representations of bodily differences, gender and sexuality
- Modern French philosophy
- French film studies
- Cultural policy studies, political thought and social history
- Linguistic Landscapes and Multilingualism
Current Research projects
French Foreign Policy in its Cultural Dimensions
French T-Shirt Slogans and Gender
Secrets and their Keepers in Renaissance France, 1560-1620
French Theories of the Anthropocene
Embodiment in European film and television after the digital revolution
The Ethics of Violent Action in Political Struggle
Circulus vitiosus deus: Klossowski, Nietzsche, and the Deconstruction of Christianity
Toxic Masculinity and the literary establishment
The Power of Play: Satire in Modern French Political Culture
Women, Intoxication and Self-Destruction in 19th-Century France