Professor Charles Forsdick

Degrees: 

• BA (Oxon)
• PhD (Lancaster)

Awards & Prizes:    

• Philip Leverhulme Prize (2005)
• Member of the Academy of Europe (2011)
• Fellow of the British Academy (2021)

Research Interests:    

Francophone postcolonial studies, particularly postcolonial literature; French colonial history (including Haiti); the transatlantic traffic in enslaved Africans; travel writing and exoticism; translation studies; world literature and graphic fiction

Biography:    

I studied French as an undergraduate at New College, Oxford. After graduating I completed a PhD at Lancaster on the author, traveller and naval doctor Victor Segalen, under the supervision of Dr David Steel. Following my first post as Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow (where I was appointed in 1995), I moved to the James Barrow Chair of French at the University of Liverpool in 2001. I was President of the Society for French Studies, 2012-14, Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of International Slavery, 2010-13, and served as chair of sub-panel D26 (Modern Languages and Linguistics) for REF2021. From 2012 until 2021, I was AHRC Theme Leadership Fellow for 'Translating Cultures'. Elected to the Drapers Professorship of French at Cambridge in 2023, I became a Fellow of Murray Edwards at the same time. I am currently Lead Fellow for Languages at the British Academy.

Publications (selected):

Authored/co-authored

• Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity: Journeys between Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
• Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures: the Persistence of Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 
• New Approaches to Twentieth-Century Travel Literature in French: History, Theory, Genre (New York: Lang, 2006; ‘Travel writing across the disciplines’; v. 10). [co-authored with Feroza Basu and Siobhán Shilton.]
• Ella Maillart, “Oasis interdites” (Geneva: Zoé, 2008). 
• Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (London: Pluto, 2017) [co-authored with Christian Høgsbjerg]

Edited/co-edited:

• Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction, ed. by Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (London: Arnold, 2003).
• The Francophone Bande Dessinée, ed. by Charles Forsdick, Laurence Grove and Elizabeth McQuillan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005). 
• The Modern Francophone Essay: Movement, Instability, Performance, ed. by Charles Forsdick and Andrew Stafford (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005). 
• Grounding a World: Essays on the Work of Kenneth White, ed. by Gavin Bowd, Charles Forsdick, and Norman Bissell (Glasgow: Alba, 2005). 
• Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empire, ed. by Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boetsch, Eric Deroo, Sandrine Lemaire and Charles Forsdick (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008).
• Postcolonial Thought in the French-Speaking World, ed. by Charles Forsdick and David Murphy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009). 
• Transnational French Studies: Postcolonialism and Littérature-monde, ed. by Charles Forsdick, Alec Hargreaves and David Murphy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press; Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies, 2010). 
• Travel Writing: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. by Tim Youngs and Charles Forsdick, 4 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2012). 
• Travel and Ethics: Theory and Practice, ed. by Charles Forsdick, Corinne Fowler, and Ludmilla Kostova (New York: Routledge, 2013). 
• La Revue: The Twentieth-Century Periodical in French, ed. by Charles Forsdick and Andrew Stafford (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013). 
• The Black Jacobins Reader, ed. by Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
• Keywords for Travel Writing Studies, ed. by Charles Forsdick, Zoe Kinsley and Kate Walchester (London: Anthem Press, 2019). 
• Georges Perec’s Geographies: Material, Performative and Textual Spaces, ed. by Charles Forsdick, Andrew Leak and Richard Phillips (London: UCL Press, 2019).
• Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France, ed. by Charles Forsdick, Etienne Achille and Lydie Moudileno (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020). 
• Framing the Penal Colony: Representing, Interpreting and Imagining Convict Transportation, ed. by Sophie Fuggle, Charles Forsdick and Katharina Massing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). 
• Transnational French Studies, ed. by Charles Forsdick and Claire Launchbury (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023).