Officers of the Society
ELECTED MEMBERS
PRESIDENT
Prof. Maria Scott
University of Exeter
M.Scott@exeter.ac.uk
Maria Scott is Associate Professor of French Literature and Thought at the University of Exeter. She works mainly on nineteenth-century literature in French, most recently with an emphasis on the psychology and philosophy of empathy. Her latest book, Empathy and the Strangeness of Fiction: Readings in French Realism, was published with Edinburgh University Press in 2020. She is also the author of Stendhal’s Less-Loved Heroines: Fiction, Freedom, and the Female (Legenda, 2013), subsequently published in translation as Stendhal, la liberté et les héroïnes mal aimées (Garnier, 2015), and of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris: Shifting Perspectives (Ashgate, 2005). She has co-edited the journal special issues ‘Crossings and Interconnections’ (Dix-Neuf, 2023), ‘Baudelaire and Other People’ (L’Esprit Créateur, 2018), and ‘Stendhal in the 21st Century/ Stendhal au XXIe siècle’ (Dix-Neuf, 2015), as well as the volume Artful Deceptions: Verbal and Visual Trickery in French Culture (Peter Lang, 2006). She is a member of the editorial board of La Revue Stendhal, for which she is currently co-editing a special issue on Cognition to be published in 2025. She is also a member of the advisory board of the Irish Journal of French Studies, of which she was General Editor for four years from 2015.
SECRETARY
Prof. Heather Williams
University of Wales
h.williams@cymru.ac.uk
Heather Williams is a Professor at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. Her research career began with nineteenth-century French poetry, and a version of her doctoral thesis was published as Mallarmé’s Ideas in Language (2004). Heather has since specialized on Brittany’s literature and culture, publishing Postcolonial Brittany: Literature Between Languages (2007), and New Dialogues with Breton Culture (a special issue of Nottingham French Studies, 2021), with David Evans. Her research focuses on cultural interfaces, and she has worked on cultural exchange between French, Breton and Welsh, addressing issues in translation studies, travel writing, transnational studies, postcolonialism and ecocriticism. She has also worked extensively on nineteenth-century French travel writing, as part of the ‘European Travellers to Wales’ AHRC-funded project (Welcome | European Travellers to Wales (bangor.ac.uk)) and the follow-on project for impact and engagement ‘Journey to the Past’ (Introduction – Journey to the Past (bangor.ac.uk)). With Kathryn Jones and Carol Tully, the findings were published as Hidden Texts, Hidden Nation: (Re) Discoveries of Wales in Travel Writing in French and German (1780-2018) (2020). Heather is currently working on an archives project on Breton – Welsh archives in Wales and Brittany with colleagues at the Centre de recherche bretonne et celtique, Université de Bretagne occidentale, funded by Collex-Persée.
TREASURER
Dr Susannah Wilson
University of Warwick
S.M.Wilson@warwick.ac.uk
Susannah Wilson is Reader in French Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research interests focus on nineteenth and early twentieth-century French cultural history and literature. She has published on themes in medical and cultural history; women’s lives and writing; sex, gender, pathology, and criminality; the history of the French psychological sciences; and different forms of self-writing (correspondence, memoir, etc.). Her new book will be published with Cornell University Press in 2025, under the title A Most Quiet Murder: Maternity, Affliction, and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century France. It is a microhistory of an obscure murder case that briefly caused a sensation in 1880s Dijon. The book explores the psychology and culture of motherhood, childbirth and child loss, poverty and dispossession, and taboos around female violence. Her first book, Voices from the Asylum: Four French Women Writers, 1850-1920 (Oxford University Press, 2010), investigated the lives and writings of a number of women incarcerated in French psychiatric hospitals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
MEMBERSHIP SECRETARY
Dr Emma Bielecki
King’s College London
emma.bielecki@kcl.ac.uk
Emma Bielecki is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century French Studies at King’s College London. Her research focusses on the interchanges between literature and other forms of cultural expression, including silent cinema, stage magic and fashion. She is the author of The Collector in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Representation, Identity, Knowledge (2012) and is currently working on a monograph entitled The Lives of Vidocq: Celebrity, Criminality and the Nineteenth-Century Novel.
CONFERENCE OFFICER
Dr Sarah Gubbins
University of Dundee
sgubbins001@dundee.ac.uk
Sarah Gubbins is a Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Dundee. Her research focuses on French poetry of the mid-nineteenth century and on the prose writings of poets of that period. She has published articles and chapters on formal and generic aspects of the writings of Gérard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire, on their exploitation of the press, and on Nerval’s travel writing in verse and in prose. A monograph, Gérard de Nerval’s Political Poetics, is under contract with Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Sarah also sits on the Editorial Board of the Irish Journal of French Studies.
POSTGRADUATE AND EARLY CAREER RESEARCHERS’ REPRESENTATIVE
Dr Helen McKelvey
drhelenmckelvey@gmail.com
Twitter: @mckelvey_helen
Helen McKelvey is a Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow, having previously held a position at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research looks at the use of religious imagery and narrative in nineteenth-century French writing about the Transatlantic slave trade, and she teaches more broadly on legacies of slavery and the French-speaking Caribbean.
APPOINTED MEMBERS
ACTING VICE-PRESIDENT
Dr David Evans
University of St Andrews
dee3@st-andrews.ac.uk
David Evans is Reader in French Studies at the University of St Andrews. He works on nineteenth-century French poetry, looking at questions of form and aesthetic value in the books Rhythm, Illusion and The Poetic Idea: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé (Rodopi, 2004) and Théodore de Banville: Constructing Poetic Value in Nineteenth-Century France (Legenda, 2014). He has edited or co-edited journal special issues on Banville, Breton writing, and poetic rhythm, as well as volumes of essays on ghosts, institutions and power, and pleasure and pain in French literature and culture. Other publications have covered ecocritical approaches to poetry, cultural identity in the French-language poetry of Brittany and Corsica, queerness and parody in Verlaine, art song settings of Verlaine and Baudelaire, and contemporary engagements with C19th French culture such as Lisa Robertson’s novel The Baudelaire Fractal (2020). He is currently general editor of the journal French Studies and, with Beth Gerwin (University of Lethbridge), C19th French editor for the Literary Encyclopedia (www.litencyc.com).
EDITOR, Dix-Neuf
Prof. Susan McCready
University of South Alabama
smccread@southalabama.edu
Susan McCready is Professor of French at the University of South Alabama, where she co-directs the Centre for the Study of War and Memory. Her research and teaching focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature, theatre, and performance studies. Her publications include Staging France between the World Wars (Lexington Books, 2016), and The Limits of Performance in the French Romantic Theatre (Durham Modern Language Series, 2007). With Pratima Prasad, she is also the co-editor of Novel Stages: Drama and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Delaware Press, 2007). Her articles have appeared in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Dix-Neuf, Romance Notes, George Sand Studies, Contemporary French Civilization and Dalhousie French Studies, amongst others. She serves on the executive committee of the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association.
EDITOR, Dix-Neuf
Dr Valentina Gosetti
University of New England, Australia
vgosetti@une.edu.au
Valentina Gosetti is a poetry translator and Associate Professor in French at the University of New England in Australia. Her main research interests include poetry by authors from the provinces of France, poetry by women, poetry translation, poetry in the lesser-spoken languages of Europe, language equality, and the development of prose poetry. She authored Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit: Beyond the Prose Poem (2016), co-edited Still Loitering: Australian Essays in Honour of Ross Chambers (2020) and co-edited/co-translated the bilingual anthology Donne: Poeti di Francia e oltre (2017). She is co-editor of the book series ‘Romanticism and After in France’ (Peter Lang) with Patrick McGuinness and she has been serving as the president of Women in French: Australia (Wif: OZ) since 2024. With Heather Williams, she guest-edited a double issue of French Studies Bulletin (2023) entitled “Bypassing Paris” and with Daniel A. Finch-Race (as #TeamFinchetti) a double issue of Dix-Neuf about “Ecoregions” (2019). Her solo and joint articles appear or are forthcoming in Australian Journal of French Studies, Dix-Neuf, French Studies Bulletin, L’Esprit Créateur, PMLA, Revue Bertrand, Romantisme, Human Geography, cultural geographies, Costellazioni: Rivista di lingue e letterature, Journal of Cultural Geography, Nineteenth-Century French Studies. At the moment, she is putting the final touches on a new monograph titled Poetry in the Provinces.
EDITOR, Dix-Neuf
Dr Edmund Birch
University of Cambridge
eb375@cam.ac.uk
Edmund Birch is College Lecturer in French at Churchill College and Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. His research interests focus on the novel, the history of journalism, nineteenth-century politics and popular culture, and his work draws on a range of authors including Balzac, the brothers Goncourt and Maupassant. He is the author of Fictions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century France (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and co-editor of Literature and the Press in France, a special number of the journal Dix-Neuf (2017). His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the Modern Language Review, Nineteenth-Century French Studies and Romanic Review, and he has reviewed for a number of publications, most recently the Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France. He is currently writing a book about Alexandre Dumas père.
SOCIAL MEDIA OFFICER
Dr Amy McTurk-Starkie
University of St Andrews
am494@st-andrews.ac.uk
Amy McTurk-Starkie completed her PhD on George Sand’s representation of women artists at the University of St Andrews, where she currently works as Executive Officer to the Principal and Vice-Chancellor. She is author of two articles: “Staging Alternatives to the Marriage Plot: Clashing Narratives of Female Agency in George Sand’s La Marquise (1832)” in Modern Language Review and “Le portrait de l’artiste peint par elle-même: Negotiations of the Artist-Muse Binary in George Sand’s Elle et lui (1859)” in Women in French Studies. The latter was the joint winner of the 2021 Women in French Graduate Student Essay Award. Amy moderates the Society’s social media (Bluesky, X, and Facebook).
WEB OFFICER
Dr Max McGuinness
Trinity College Dublin
MCGUINM8@tcd.ie
Twitter: @MaxMcGuinness4
Max McGuinness is a Research Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in French at Trinity College Dublin, having previously taught at University College Dublin, the University of Limerick, and Columbia University, where he received his PhD in French. His current research focuses on political themes in Proust and Franco-Irish literary imaginaries. He is the author of Hustlers in the Ivory Tower: Press and Modernism from Mallarmé to Proust (Liverpool University Press, 2024) and co-editor, with Prof. Michael Cronin, of The Irish Proust: Cultural Crossings from Beckett to McGahern (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025). Other publications include articles in the Bulletin d’informations proustiennes, Dix-Neuf, French Studies Bulletin, Paragraph, and Romanic Review. He was also a theatre critic for The Financial Times in New York and Dublin from 2016 to 2024 and currently reviews theatre for The Irish Times.
OFFICER
Dr Christie Margrave
Cardiff University
MargraveC1@cardiff.ac.uk
Christie Margrave is a Lecturer in French at Cardiff University, where she is also the School of Modern Languages’ Director of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. Her research focuses on Francophone women’s writing and marginalized voices. Currently, she researches narrative reproductive medicine, lived experiences of birthing, and representations of non-normative families in 21st-century literature. She also researches 19th-century women’s writing, Ecocriticism, and (post)colonial fiction. She is the author of Writing the Landscape: Exposing Nature in French Women’s Fiction 1789-1815 (2019), and has published articles in Dix-Neuf, Essays in French Literature, and Culture, Journal of Romance Studies, and chapters in the volumes Le monde du roman français|The World of the French Novel (1800-1830), The Palgrave Handbook of Transnational Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century, and Women Writing Men, 1689-1869.
HONORARY MEMBERS
Prof. Jennifer Yee
University of Oxford
jennifer.yee@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
Prof. Robert Lethbridge
University of Cambridge
rdl11@cam.ac.uk
Prof. Tim Unwin
University of Bristol
T.A.Unwin@bristol.ac.uk
Prof. Susan Harrow
University of Bristol
S.R.Harrow@bristol.ac.uk
Prof. Anne Green
King’s College London
anne.green@kcl.ac.uk
Prof. Nigel Harkness
Newcastle University
nigel.harkness@newcastle.ac.uk