Professor Andy Stafford

Profile

BA, MA, PhD (Nottingham), HDR (Grenoble), member of French Studies at Leeds since 2003.

Honorary positions and awards

• Professeur invité at the Université de Paris-XIII (2019–2020).
• ‘Habilitation a diriger des recherches’ (HDR), Université de Grenoble, 2011.
• Editorial board member of Barthes Studies and of Revue Roland Barthes.
• Member of the ‘Equipe Barthes’, at the Institut des textes et manuscrits (ITEM), in the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris.
• Chair of the Art, Architecture and Literature panel, for the Flanders Research Council (FWO), in Brussels.

Publications

• Appearing with Anthem Press in Autumn 2022: Roland Barthes Writing the Political: History, Dialectics, Self.
• Current book project: a monograph provisionally called Photo-texts From Below, which looks at collectivism in photography alongside texts in French since the Millennium.

Recent publications

• ‘Centenaire engagé: vers le phototexte “collectiviste”’, chapter in Charlotte Faucher Zarmanian and Magali Nachtergael eds, Le Phototexte engagé (Presses du Réel, 2021).
• ‘Poésie dans les prisons du roi. Dialectique du solaire dans l’oeuvre carcérale d’Abdellatif Laâbi’, chapter in Michael Abecassis and Maribel Penalver Vicea eds, Rêve d’écriture et écriture du rêve (Classiques Garnier, 2021).
• ‘“Intersectionalité” des femmes noires? Le cas de la Revue du monde noir (Paris, 1931–1932)’, chapter in Amélie Auzoux, Camille Koskas, Lisa Russo eds, Des Revues et des Femmes (Honoré-Champion, 2022).

New research projects in preparation

• Global Barthes in World Literature – with Alexandru Matei (Brasov University, Romania).
• The Poetry of Zaghloul Morsy – with Khalid Lyamlahy (University of Chicago).

Research interests

I am a Critical Theorist, specialising in the work of Roland Barthes. For my latest book on Barthes, I have written a blog: ‘A Sensitive, Avid and Silent Political Subject’: Roland Barthes, Politics-Polemics-Pandemics – Anthem Press Blog.

I am currently working on the photo-textual work of prize-winning Algerian-French artist, Mohamed Bourouissa, in particular his 2005–2008 banlieue project Périphérique and on his extraordinary photobook on French prison life, made with his friend Al, Temps mort.

I am looking at how language (of all sorts) is used to inflect and politically commit the striking range of images. The book that I am writing then looks at ‘people on the move’ (illegal migrants and refugees) in the photo-textual work of Aziz Chouaki, Mathieu Pernot; at First World War resistance in the stunning work of Chloe Dewe Mathews, Shot at Dawn/Fusillés pour l’exemple in which she photographs in 2014 places in France where deserters were summarily shot; at Algerian memories of independence in the recent collaboration between writer Kamel Daoud and photographer Raymond Depardon. Other chapters will be on Indian photographer Bishan Samaddar’s ‘remediation’ of Barthes’s sexually-controversial notes Incidents, and, I am hoping, on the care sector during the pandemic and in relation to ageing.

Research groups and institutes

• Digital cultures
• French
• Literary studies
• Politics
• Centre for World Literatures

Current postgraduate researchers

• Isla Paterson