The Department of French at UCC is an internationally leading centre for some of the most inventive and original research in the discipline. Invigorated by the arrival of three new colleagues in 2024, two at Lecturer and one at Professor level, and a further new Lecturer in Autumn 2026, we have expertise in the following principal areas:

• Modern and contemporary French philosophy, theory and thought (including radical political theory, psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory)
• Francophone colonial and postcolonial studies (Africa and the Caribbean)
• Second language acquisition and Sociolinguistics
• Translation Studies (including audiovisual translation)
• Queer theory and Queer Studies
• The Medical and Psychedelic Humanities
• Disability Studies
• The digital public sphere
• The impact of generative AI on education and society

Why not join us in person or online for one of our Research Seminars?

You can find more information about our Postgraduate Research degrees here. We warmly welcome inquiries from prospective Postdoctoral researchers funded by, for example, an EMPOWER or Research Ireland Pathway or Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellowship.

Our researchers are very active contributors to collaborative research undertaken at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures (CASiLaC), our School’s interdisciplinary research centre and part of the Future Humanities Institute, Collective Social Futures and other UCC Futures research priority areas.

Research Staff

Professor Oliver Davis

• Modern and contemporary French philosophy, theory and literature
• Queer theory
• The psychedelic humanities
• Policing the digital: conspiracy and disinformation

Dr Kate Hodgson

• Postcolonial Francophone literature and culture
• The Caribbean
• Travel writing
• Slavery and abolition
• Memory and commemoration

Professor Martin Howard

• Second language acquisition
• Variationist sociolinguistics
• French language
• Applied linguistics
• Language pedagogy

Dr Laura Kennedy

• Postcolonial Francophone literature, theory and culture 
• Comparative and World Literature (francophone / anglophone)
• North Africa
• The French Caribbean 
• The global circulation and marketisation of literature
• The preservation of minoritised language variations through literature

Professor Patrick O'Donovan

• Modern and contemporary French literature
• History of ideas, in particular political thought
• Critical theory
• Linguistics and literature

Dr Cillian Ó Fathaigh

• Contemporary & 20th-century French philosophy
• Illness & Disability Studies
• The Digital Public Sphere
• The impact of generative AI on education and society

Dr Sinan Richards

• Psychoanalysis and Race.
• History of French psychoanalysis.
• Institutional Psychotherapy (Tosquelles, Oury, Bonnafé, etc).
• Gender Studies, literature, and psychoanalysis.
• 19th & 20th-century French, Francophone and European Philosophy (for example, Jacques Lacan; Jean Paul-Sartre; Frantz Fanon).

Dr Hannah Silvester

• Translation Studies
• Audiovisual translation and AVT research methodology
• Subtitling
• Translating linguistic variation
• French banlieue cinema
• Subtitler working practices and conditions

Dr Caroline Williamson Sinalo

• Francophone Africa
• Peace, conflict and genocide, trauma
• Medical Humanities
• Women’s and gender studies
• Translation and minority languages

Postgraduate Research Students (co-)supervised in the Department

• Daniel Fraser (PhD)
• Louisa Diagana (PhD)
• Darwesh Obeid (PhD)
• Aristotelis Tokatlidis (PhD)
• Ewelina Urbanska (PhD)
• Joy Uwanziga (PhD)
• Eimear O’Riordan (PhD)
• Margaret O’Carroll (MRes)
• Roisín O’Connor (MRes)
• Aaron O’Donovan (MRes)