Dr Emma Bielecki

I have a BA in English and French from the University of Oxford, an MA in European History from UCL, and a PhD in French Studies from King's College London. Before taking up my current post at King's in 2018 I was a lecturer at Oxford.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• The Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century
• The Novel
• Literary aesthetics
• Popular fiction
• Nineteenth-century understandings of policing and criminality

I wrote my doctoral thesis on representations of the collector in French literature from Balzac to Proust, exploring interchanges between literary aesthetics and material culture. Since then, I have published a series of articles on detective serials of the Belle Époque, and am currently preparing a monograph on detectives in the nineteenth-century cultural imaginary.

I have supervised graduate work on Balzac, fin-de-siècle writing, and nineteenth-century theatre inter alia. I would welcome doctoral students interested in nineteenth-century literature, especially in its relation to other kinds of cultural expression.

For more details, please see my full research profile.

Teaching

I teach broadly across the modern period at undergraduate level and contribute to final-year language teaching. At MA level, I teach literary and critical theory. I also enjoy teaching translation.

Expertise and public engagement

I have written for outlets including The Conversation (on the Netflix Lupin series) and The Junket (on French Belle Époque crime serials) and I have appeared on Talk Radio to discuss the Netflix Lupin series. I have also been involved in a large range of outreach activities for French learners in schools, including talks at the Prince's Teaching Institute. I contributed to the Cambridge Collaborative A-level Resources Series for French with a short video on Delphine de Vigan's, 'No et moi'.

Selected Publications

• 'Du dandysme et de Robert-Houdin : le prestidigitateur comme dandy’, in L’Artiste de la vie modern, ed. by Edyta Kociubińska (Brill: Leiden, 2023), pp. 183-197.  
• 'Call It Transmutation: the Radioactive Poetics of Gaston Leroux's and Maurice Leblanc's Detective Fiction', Forum for Modern Language Studies 57:4 (October 2021), 417-437.
• 'On Fathers and feuilletonistes: Creativity and Paternity in Balzac's La Muse du département', French Studies 72:4 (Oct 2018), 521-538.
• 'Arsène Lupin Goes to War', Nottingham French Studies, 56:1 (2017), 52-66
• 'Fantômas's Shifting Identities: From Books to Screen', Studies in French Cinema 13:1 (January 2013), 3-15
• The Collector in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Representation, Identity, Knowledge (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012).