Biography

My undergraduate and postgraduate studies were at the University of Oxford. I graduated from Keble College, Oxford, with an MA in Modern Languages (French and Linguistics) in 1995. After a year studying for an MSt in Research Methods, I was awarded my DPhil on the novelist and writer François Mauriac in February 2000. I was a Laming Junior Fellow at Queen's College, Oxford between 1999 and 2001, before joining Durham University as Lecturer in French in September 2001. I took up the Carnegie Chair of French at the University of Aberdeen in September 2013. I have been Head of the School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture (January 2016-August 2019), and Director of the George Washington Wilson Centre for Visual Culture, which is based in the School (September 2013-January 2016). In July 2021, I began a three-year term as Chair of the University Council of Modern Languages (Scotland) and Scotland representative on the Executive Committee of the national UCML. During 2022, I was Deputy Chair of the Advisory Group reviewing the QAA Subject Benchmark Statement for Languages, Cultures and Societies.

Research Overview

My research focuses especially on the cultural history of post-war France, as it lives through the twin dramas of modernisation and decolonisation. I explore how those dramas are played out in literary and visual culture, with a particular interest in the nature of the photographic image and its role as part of a visual economy of meaning. My first book focused on the novelist and writer François Mauriac, and his emergence as an intellectual and figure of moral authority during the 1950s and 60s. Working with Dr Joe McGonagle (University of Manchester), I completed an AHRC-funded project in 2011 investigating the representation of the Franco-Algerian relationship from the time of French Algeria to the present day. As part of the project, we curated the exhibition New Cartographies: Algeria-France-UK at Cornerhouse in Manchester (now HOME). Our book, Contesting Views: The Visual Economy of France and Algeria, was published by Liverpool University Press in May 2013.

My most recent book, Making Space in Post-war France: The Dreams, Realities and Aftermath of State Planning, published by Legenda in 2023, emerges out of my long-standing interest in French space, territory and modernisation to examine how France's look, feel and lived realities were transformed by spatial planning in the decades after World War 2. I investigate how France's future was envisioned by the planners during the 1960s and 1970s and inscribed on the ground as new towns, infrastructure and other built forms. Ranging across work by Agnès Varda, Éric Rohmer and Jean Rolin amongst others, I explore how modernized landscapes and their effect on lived experience begin to permeate French culture during the 1970s and 80s and how France negotiates the social and political consequences of spatial planning from the 1990s into the new millennium.

Current Research

In the next phase of my research, I am setting out to investigate the relationship between post-war spatial planning and the environment. At stake on the one hand are the radical ways in which spatial planning reengineered landscapes and the environment: hydroelectric schemes, mosquito eradication programmes, ports and petro-chemical complexes. On the other are the ways in which the often unforeseen consequences and legacies of those environmental interventions have emerged over time, in particular as France begins to face the realities of climate crisis during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Also in play is how new infrastructure projects have galvanized climate activism, made manifest in forms of territorial insurrection like the zone à défendre at Notre-Dame-des-Landes near Nantes.

I would be very happy to hear from potential postgraduate students interested in topics related to any of my research areas.