French

Contact Details

Title	Professor
Address	French University College Cork Ireland
Telephone:	+353-21-490-2887
Fax:	+353 21 490-3284
Email:	ei.ccu@dotp
Homepage:	Web Page

Biography:

My interest in French is centred on modern and contemporary literature and thought. At present, the large-scale projects on which I'm working extend over two main areas: fiction and poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (writers on whom I'm working just now include Vigny and Proust); and the issue of the limit in French thought today (I'm interested, in other words, in problems of the sort which prompt Michel Foucault to characterize philosophy as a practice that consists in adopting a limit stance).

My teaching covers these and several other areas. I am glad to hear at any time from interested postgraduate students and post-doctoral researchers, and you can find out more about areas in which I can offer supervision and mentorship in these pages. In 2010-11, I am co-ordinating a doctoral and early career summer school on Comparing: Objects, Approaches, Problems, Opportunities, which is funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

I was appointed to the Professorship of French in U.C.C. in 1994. I am a graduate of U.C.C., where I obtained an M.A. I also studied in the Université de Paris-Sorbonne and in the University of Cambridge, where I was a member of Jesus College and where I obtained a Ph.D. I taught for a time in the University of Dundee and then in St John's College, Oxford. I was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, from 1989 to 1994.

I have had a number of other research and scholarly responsibilities. I am a former editor of the journal French Studies and am now a member of its Advisory Board, and am also a former President of the Association d'Études Françaises et Francophones d'Irlande. I have also been a member of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.