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 Professorial level, 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
• Queer theory and queer studies

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 reseachers funded by, for example, a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship or the Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellowship. Please contact Dr Kate Hodgson, French Department Research Lead, for more information.

Our researchers are very active contributors to collaborative research undertaken in our School’s interdisciplinary research centre, as well as in other research clusters of the Future Humanities Institute, Collective Social Futures and other UCC Futures research priority areas.

Researchers

Dr Charlotte Berkery

• Nineteenth-century French literature and visual culture
• Night Studies
• History of Paris and Urban Humanities
• Women Writers
• Digital Humanities

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
• History
• 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 Sinan Richards

• Psychoanalysis and Race.
• History of French Psychoanalysis.
• Institutional Psychotherapy (Tosquelles, Oury, Bonnafé, etc).
• Comparative literature at the crossroads of cultural studies and historical epistemology with a feminist philosophy perspective.
• Gender Studies, literature, and Psychoanalysis.
• Nineteenth and Twentieth Century French, Francophone, and European Philosophy (for example, Jacques Lacan; Jean Paul-Sartre; Frantz Fanon; German Idealism).

Dr Hannah Silvester

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

Dr Caroline Williamson Sinalo

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