Dr Tom Baldwin, Reader in French in the Department of Modern Languages, has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship to bring Professor Suzanne Guerlac, Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley, to Kent during the autumn term 2020.

Professor Guerlac’s research focuses on articulations between nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature and visual culture, and on European literary theory and philosophy from the eighteenth century onwards. Her publications include the monographs The Impersonal Sublime: Hugo, Baudelaire, Lautréamont and the Esthetics of the Sublime (Stanford University Press, 1990); Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton (Stanford University Press, 1997); Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Cornell University Press, 2006); and a co-edited volume, Derrida and the Time of the Political (Duke University Press, 2009). She has also recently completed a monograph entitled Proust and the Time of Life: Photography, Money and Desire in ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Professor Guerlac’s visit will be hosted by the Centre for Modern European Literature (CMEL). She will work with academic staff and students affiliated with CMEL and with other research centres and Schools at the University to share the knowledge and expertise developed through her interdisciplinary research projects. Her visit will include lectures and research seminars at both Kent and other UK universities, as well as workshops in undergraduate and MA seminars related to her expertise.