Our staff

Staff categories

These are our Birkbeck staff categories within the Department of Cultures and Languages.

Robin Howells specialises in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature and culture (classicism and, principally, Enlightenment). He also uses paradigms from Bakhtin (carnivalesque, dialogism, polemical stupidity) to examine aspects of literature generally. His main research interests are Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and the writing and visual arts of the late eighteenth century.
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John Kraniauskas is a specialist in Latin American literary and cultural studies, cultural theory and political philosophy with particular interests in relations between state and cultural forms. John was a founding co-editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.
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Patrick Pollard is professor of French, nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, Gide, the classical tradition, and gender. His research interests include the history of ideas (with an emphasis on nineteenth- to twentieth-century France), history of literature, history of homosexuality and the classical tradition in France, specifically the history of the translation of Greek and Latin authors into French, the modern reuse of ancient myths, and gender and sexuality. He has been a member of the Association des Amis d’André Gide since its inception, and is currently Honorary Treasurer of the Emile Zola Society, London.
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Madeleine Renouard's most recent co-edited book Barbara Wright Translation As Art was published in 2013 by Dalkey Archive Press. She is currently editing the poet Lorand Gaspar's hospital diaries and notes. Madeleine was for many years Editor of La Chouette journal.

Ian Short's research interests include medieval studies, in particular French vernacular literature, Anglo-Norman, and the epic.
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