New staff in the Department of French
The Department of French is pleased to announce that three new members of staff will be joining during the course of the 2012-13 academic year.
Dr Andrew Counter will be joining the Department as Lecturer in 19th-century French studies in September 2012. He was previously a Fellow and College Lecturer in French and Director of Studies in Modern and Medieval Languages at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. His PhD, titled “‘Some Day, All This Will Be Yours’: Narratives of Inheritance in Nineteenth-Century France”, was completed at Christ's College, Cambridge in 2008. He is the author of Inheritance in Nineteenth-Century French Culture: Wealth, Knowledge and the Family (Oxford: Legenda, 2010), and is currently preparing a monograph provisionally titled Sexuality and Culture in the French Restoration (1814-1830).
Dr Michael Meere will be joining the Department in September 2012 as Temporary Lecturer in 16th-century French literature. Michael Meere received his PhD in French from the University of Virginia. He has held academic appointments at Princeton University, Columbia University and most recently College of the Holy Cross. Michael's research focuses on early modern French literature and thought with broader interests in cultural and visual studies, performing arts, and critical theory. His current book project, Prehistories of French Tragedy: Ethics, Poetics, and Performances of Violence examines the gradual shift from a violent stage to a narrative one in Renaissance and early classical France and is akin to a cultural history of the performance of violence during decades of civil war, social unrest, and political instability.
Dr Anna Magdalena Elsner will join the Department of French and the Centre for the Humanities and Health as a Swiss National Science Foundation Research Fellow in August 2013. Dr Elsner previously held the Joanna Randall McIver Research Fellowship at St Hugh's College, Oxford. She completed a PhD on the relationship between mourning and creativity in À la recherche du temps perdu and an MPhil in European Literature and Culture at Cambridge and holds a BA in Philosophy and Modern Languages from Oxford. During her studies, Anna has spent two years at the École Normale Supérieure and she is a member of the Équipe Proust at the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes/ENS Paris. She is currently preparing her book on mourning and creativity in Proust for publication. Her current research project is situated within the ‘medical humanities’ and analyses the representation of the doctor-patient encounter in twentieth-century literature and film.