BA (Oxon), MA, DPhil (Sussex)

My BA was in Modern Languages (French and German) at St John's College, Oxford, which I followed with an MA in Critical Theory and DPhil in French Studies at the University of Sussex. I then worked as a lectrice (colloquial assistant of English) for two years in France (Dijon and Paris) before being appointed to a lecturership in French at Birmingham, in 1990. I was made Reader in French Film and Gender Studies in 2006, and Professor of French and Visual Studies in 2020.

My latest book The Cinema of Mia Hansen-Løve: candour and vulnerability was published in Edinburgh University Press’s ‘Visionaries’ series on women film-makers in February 2021. This followed The Body and the Screen, on female subjectivities in the films of French and British women directors, which appeared in Bloomsbury’s ‘Thinking Cinema’ series in January 2017 and won BAFTSS Best Monograph award for that year. I was PI of the AHRC network ‘Serge Daney and queer cinephilia’ from July 2018 to June 2021, with Professor Marc Siegel of the University of Mainz, Germany as Co-Investigator, and Dr Pierre Eugene of the Université d’Amiens as third project team member; a collection of essays arising from this network project was published by Meson Press early in 2024.