Staff Research Areas
Dr. Sarah Alyn-Stacey
French Renaissance poetry; French Renaissance literature with particular reference to Marc-Claude de Buttet (1529/30?-1586) and the court circle of Marguerite de France, duchesse de Savoie; Classical and Italian influences on French Renaissance literature; Comparative Renaissance literature (French, English, Italian); Critical theory, notably its application to Renaissance texts, and also the related concerns of intertextuality and literary hermeneutics; contemporary cinema.
Dr. Edward Arnold
20th-century French intellectual, political and social history; history of ideas in late 19th and early 20th century Europe; right and left-wing counterrevolution, nationalism and fascism(s) in France, 1880s-1945.
Prof. Michael Cronin
Translation theory; translation history; travel writing; ecocriticism; contemporary Francophone literatures; food studies; minority languages; Franco-Irish relationships
Dr. James Hanrahan
Cultural, political and intellectual history of the eighteenth century; Manuscript, book and print culture of the Enlightenment; Enlightenment and public opinion; Intellectuals and public opinion; Enlightenment historiography and the historiography of the Enlightenment; Origins and the Enlightenment; Critical editions of Voltaire's works.
Dr. Rachel Hoare
Linguistics; Second language acquisition; Sociolinguistics of French, especially attitudes towards regional languages and varieties in France, and language variation.
Dr. Niall Kennedy
I research Modern French Philosophy, particularly the philosophy of literature, film, and the arts. My research to date has focused on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, but I also have interests in the work of Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and Jean-Luc Nancy. I am also developing a second research strand focusing on French and Francophone cinema, and in particular the cinema of Francophone Africa.
Dr. Alexandra Lukes
19th- and 20th-century literature; relations between literature, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and linguistics; madness, nonsense, and marginal forms of writing; Lewis Carroll, Stéphane Mallarmé, Antonin Artaud, Surrealism; translation studies and translation theory; literary bilingualism; autobiography.
Dr. Hannes Opelz
Theories of representation in Western thought and aesthetics; mimetic theory; deconstruction; myth studies; theory of tragedy; science fiction studies; Jean-Jacques Rousseau; Maurice Blanchot; Georges Bataille; Walter Benjamin; Károly Kerényi; Martin Heidegger; Jacques Derrida; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.
Dr. Paule Salerno O’Shea
Language and translation; contemporary France; business; negotiation and mediation
Current PhD projects
Alexandra Corey (awaiting update)
David Gaughran, The Enlightenment and Islam. Supervisor: Dr James Hanrahan. Project Description: How did Europe encounter and represent Islam in the 17th and 18th centuries and how did those representations change in those two hundred years? Why did a significant minority of European philosophers view Islam as a religion that was nearest to their ideal of a ‘natural religion’?