French – (Ph.D.)

Contents

Researchers in French are members of the Centre for Modern European Literature and are grouped in the following five clusters:

Word and Image Studies

This is a rapidly expanding research network. Peter Read came to Kent with an extensive list of interdisciplinary publications, notably on interplay between art and literature including three books published in 2008: Les Dessins de Guillaume Apollinaire; Picasso and Apollinaire The Persistence of Memory and Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters. Tom Baldwin recently authored The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust, which explores ekphrastic variations in the writings of Proust, and he is now preparing a new book that extends this critical approach to encompass a range of 18th-,19th- and 20thcentury authors. Research by Tom Baldwin and Peter Read overlaps with that of Jon Kear, a member of Kent’s School of Arts, whose publications on modern French literature and art bring him into the heart of the French’s research endeavour. Jon Kear and Peter Read have both recently published essays exploring the importance of Balzac’s Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu to works by Cézanne and Picasso. This dimension of research in Kent is further strengthened by Alex Hughes’s work on twentieth-century French literature and photography and also on French cinema, an interest she shares with Jon Kear, who is a leading authority on the work of French film director Chris Marker.

Philosophy and Critical Theory

Lorenzo Chiesa works on French critical theory, psychoanalysis and philosophy and has published books and essays on Artaud, Badiou, Foucault and Lacan including a monograph published in 2007 - Subjectivity and Otherness. A Philosophical Reading. Shane Weller is a leading Beckett scholar who in 2006, Beckett’s centenary year, spoke at nine conferences in Europe, the United States and Japan. Weller’s work on Derrida and his monograph on French literature and ethics: Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism: The Uncanniest of Guests published in 2008 match related preoccupations in the work of Tom Baldwin, Lorenzo Chiesa and James Fowler, constituting a strong research cluster in the field of French philosophy and critical theory.

Gender Studies

Ana de Medeiros, like Alex Hughes, works in twentieth-century gender studies, and has increasingly focused on francophone writing, fields that have proved attractive to postgraduates. James Fowler’s work on the literary presentation of female prudes and libertines also contributes to Gender Studies. His research on the eighteenth century, particularly on Diderot, has expanded to allow his forthcoming book on libertinage to offer a substantial re-examination of received critical views on Sade, Laclos, Richardson and Crébillon fils.

Cultural Memory

Alex Hughes, Ana de Medeiros and Peter Read all have publications in the field of Cultural Memory and this area of research is further enriched by the School’s Cultural Memory Research Project and the major international conference which was hosted by Kent in 2008.

Faculty

The Department of French is proud to offer an exciting range of postgraduate and undergraduate degrees and a unique set of international exchange programmes. You may choose from a wide selection of French modules and you may focus your studies in those areas of language, literature, culture and society that you find most stimulating. We welcome enquiries from prospective students. French at Kent has been rated as one of the top seven departments in the UK for the quality of its research activity. The facilities and resources we offer are varied and extensive and include an excellent research library, a state-of-the-art computer network, a brand new Media Centre, live satellite TV viewing for individuals or groups, personal off-air video recording facilities, an IT (CALL) lab and self-access facilities. We pride ourselves on being a friendly department, where students are treated as individuals and where the emphasis is on small-group teaching.

Our proximity to the Channel ports and Ashford International Station means you can be in France or Belgium in under two hours and London is less than an hour away. There are many French-speaking students on campus, so you have an excellent chance to immerse yourself in the language. The University of Kent at Paris has now been launched.