As an undergraduate I studied French and German at Cambridge. Before starting graduate work I held year-long English-teaching posts at the University of Tunis and in a school in rural Quebec, which inspired a lasting interest in the francophone world outside France. In 1989 I began a PhD about censorship, first back in Cambridge and then for two years in Paris, including a year working as a lector at the ENS in the rue d’Ulm. I returned to Cambridge in 1992 to take up a Junior Research Fellowship at St Catharine's College, where I began working on francophone literature of the Maghreb. After the fellowship I held a university lectureship in Cambridge. I moved to London in 1998, working first at UCL and then, from 2005, at King’s, where I have been Professor of French & Postcolonial Studies since 2007. I was elected as a Member of Academia Europaea in 2016, and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2023.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• French & Comparative Studies; Colonial / postcolonial Studies; Film Studies
• North Africa, especially its francophone writers
• Literary and critical theory
• Censorship
• Translation
• History of education
• Perceptions of race and colour

My research interests are quite diverse, but a recurring theme has been the sort of political work that literary texts and films are understood or imagined to do, by censors, writers and teachers as well as critics. This entails an interest in political and historical contexts, and in notions of literary and aesthetic specificity or value; and it has also meant reflecting on the work of teachers and critics in the humanities. That was one dimension of my most recent book, Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education (2019). I have worked extensively on writing in French from the Maghreb, especially Algeria, including work by Djebar, Dib, Feraoun, Amrouche, Chraïbi, Camus, Derrida, Cixous, Memmi, and Fanon; I have also written about Conrad, Freud, Said, the Marquis de Sade, the Tel Quel group and the Surrealists; about films by Truffaut, Cantet, Kechiche, Alice Diop, and Pontecorvo; and about issues including secularism, metaphor, comparative/world literature, translation/untranslatability, and the perception of colour.

For more details, please see my full research profile.

Teaching

North African and other francophone literature; French literature of all periods, especially the modern novel; comparative literature, postcolonial and literary theory; film; the French language (especially translation).

Expertise and public engagement

In connection with my work in postcolonial studies, especially on francophone literature, on the capacities of 'literature' in general, and on education, I have become involved in debates around the French syllabus in secondary schools, and in various professional development activities for teachers wanting to introduce new francophone/postcolonial material into their teaching. I have also convened seminars for the Aspen Institute.

Selected publications

• Circles of Censorship: Censorship and its Metaphors in French History, Literature, and Theory  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)
• Postcolonial Criticism: History, Theory and the Work of Fiction  (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003)
• The Idea of the Literary, special issue of Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, 28.2  (2005). Editor and contributor. With contributions from: Derek Attridge, Alain Badiou, Jean Bessière, Assia Djebar, Simon Jarvis, Benita Parry, Jacques Rancière, Corinna Russell.
• Gillo Pontecorvo’s ‘Battle of Algiers’, 40 Years On, special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies  9.3 (2007). Editor and contributor.  Other contributors: Danièle Djamila Amrane-Minne, Patricia Caillé, David Forgacs, Benjamin Stora, Saadi Yacef.
• 'World literature: what gets lost in translation?' Journal of Commonwealth Literature  (June 2014)
• Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education  (Liverpool University Press, 2019)