Research Interests
My research interests span contemporary French culture, film, theory and intellectual history. My two most recent book-length publications are a monograph on the French film director Robert Bresson (Manchester University Press) and a book (coauthored with Rachel Edwards) on The Papin Sisters, whose murder of their employer's wife and daughter in 1933 inspired writers and artists as divergent as Beauvoir, Genet, Lacan and Chabrol. I have also worked on the history and discourse of gastronomy in France (a book chapter forthcoming for Cambridge University Press and an article for Contemporary French Civilisation), and am currently engaged on three projects : an article on cross-dressing in French cinema, a book chapter on bovarysme in the life and worth of Edith Piaf and a book on abjection and the phallus. This latter will span psychoanalytic theory (Lacan and Kristeva), fiction (Bataille, Doubrovsky, Rochefort, Angot ...), and cinema (Godard, Eustache, Ferreri).