Skip to main content

Dr Max McGuinness

Positions held:
  • Lecturer in French, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    Email: m.mcguinness@bbk.ac.uk

    I am Lecturer in French at Birkbeck and previously held positions at Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, the University of Limerick, and Columbia University, where I received my PhD.

    My research specialisms are in modernist French literature, particularly the works of Marcel Proust, and connections between literature and journalism. My publications include Hustlers in the Ivory Tower: Press and Modernism from Mallarmé to Proust (Liverpool University Press, 2024), which was shortlisted for the 2025 R. Gapper Book Prize, and, as co-editor, The Irish Proust: Cultural Crossings from Beckett to McGahern (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025). Outside of academia, I was a theatre critic for The Financial Times and currently review theatre for The Irish Times. 

    Highlights

    Web profiles

    Professional memberships

    • Web Officer, Society of Dix-Neuviémistes

    Honours and awards

    • Research Ireland-Goverment of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship Research Ireland, September 2024
    • R. Gapper Book Prize (short-listed) Society for French Studies, September 2025

    ORCID

    0000-0002-5422-8081

  • Research

    Research

    Research overview

    My research focuses on French modernist literature, particularly its connections with journalism, political history, and Irish culture.

    My first monograph, Hustlers in the Ivory Tower: Press and Modernism from Mallarmé to Proust (Liverpool University Press, 2024), explores how French modernist writers, chiefly Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Proust, used newspaper and magazines as a 'literary laboratory', publishing poetry and imaginative prose in their pages. It shows how these interactions with the press yielded nuanced, self-conscious portrayals of the tensions between journalism and literature in works that confront their own journalistic hinterland in unprecedented depth. Hustlers in the Ivory Tower was shortlisted for 2025 R. Gapper Book Prize. 

    I also co-edited The Irish Proust: Cultural Crossings from Beckett to McGahern (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), a collection of essays that examines Proust's influence on Irish literature as well as Irish themes within his work.

    I am currently working on the politics of Proust's writing and its political reception. Whereas Proust has traditionally been seen as a conservative-leaning author, my research is centred on developing a biographically oriented left-liberal interpretation of A la recherche du temps perdu. 

  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Teaching

    Teaching modules

    • Studying Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies in Modern Languages
    • Interrogating the Self
    • Dissertation in Cultures and Languages
    • Masterpieces of French Literature and Culture: From the Enlightenment to Postmodernity (Level 4)
    • The Arts: Perspectives and Possibilities
    • Film and Politics (Level 5)
    • Poetics, Politics, History: Themes in African and Caribbean Literatures in French (Level 5)
    • French 4 (Level 4)
    • Representations of Gender, Love and Sexuality (Level 5)
    • Doing Languages, Cultures and Applied Linguistics
    • French 3 (Level 4)
    • Memory and History
    • Culture and Image