Dr Nigel Saint

Profile

I read French at Durham University and went on to University College London to study for my PhD. From 1996–97 I was a Temporary Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Then I moved to Royal Holloway, University of London, as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, from 1998–2001. In 2002 I joined the French Department in Leeds as a Lecturer.

Responsibilities

• Director of French

Research interests

My research focuses on modern French thought and the visual arts. I followed up my work on Marguerite Yourcenar and the visual with a series of articles and papers on Louis Marin's theories of representation. I am currently working on a study of the visual philosophy of Georges Didi-Huberman, with a focus on his writing on contemporary art, his reading of art historiography, his interest in the politics of the image and his exhibitions. Concurrently I am studying the poetics of memory and the politics of history in the sculptures, films and writings of the artist Pascal Convert. To date I have published a series of articles on Didi-Huberman and Convert. This intersection of philosophy and art has led me to the essays of the psychoanalyst Pierre Fédida. I am colaborating with Prof. Patrick ffrench of King’s College London on the first selection of Fédida’s essays to appear in English translation.

I am interested in supervising research in the following areas: modern theories of representation and the visual from painting to film; writing on the visual arts since Balzac and Delacroix, including art theory, art criticism and literature; the visual in 19th- and 20th-century fiction; and modern and contemporary fiction (notably Marguerite Yourcenar, Georges Perec, Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Sophie Calle). 

Qualifications

• PhD in French (UCL)
• BA (Hons) in French (Durham)

Professional memberships

• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Student education

I have taught on many different undergraduate modules since joining the University of Leeds. I teach across the first, second and third year French programme, mostly in cultural studies (broadly defined), but have also taught the French language at all levels. I have focused on art, literature and thought, from the 17^th Century to the present, with an emphasis on the post-1850 period. I am very keen to try new texts and topics, and so Leeds was among the first universities to teach the writers Virginie Despentes and Edouard Louis, the artists Pascal Convert and JR, and the philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman. I have also been closely involved in the introduction of the culture stream for our ab initio programme. 

Research groups and institutes

• French
• Literary studies
• Centre for World Literatures