Professor Margaret Atack

I was appointed Professor of French and Head of Department in 1993, having previously worked at Sunderland as Head of School (Humanities, then Social and International Studies), at Leeds as Lecturer in French, and at UCL, Southampton and Cardiff as Temporary Lecturer in French.

My research lies primarily in the areas of the literature, thought, film and culture of France in the twentieth century, and particularly the Occupation and Second World War in French fiction and film, women's writing, crime fiction and May 68.  I have supervised research MAs and PhDs in postwar French literature, film and thought, and am currently supervising Ruth Kitchen's PhD, within the project, on "Discourses of Guilt and Their Changing Functions in Representations of the German Occupation of France".

Current research projects:

Principal publications:

Literature and the French Resistance: Cultural Politics and Narrative Forms 1940-1950 (Manchester University Press, 1989).  Contemporary Women's Fiction in French: Feminist Perspectives, (co-edited with P. Powrie, Manchester University Press, 1991).  May 68 in French Fiction and Film: Rethinking Representation, Rethinking Society (Oxford University Press, 1999).  Crime and Punishment: Narratives of Order and Disorder, French Cultural Studies special issue(editor), vol.12, no. 3, October 2001.