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.
• Member of the Editorial Board for Edinburgh Critical Studies in World Literature and Intermediality

Book publications

• Roland Barthes Writing the Political: History, Dialectics, Self (Anthem Press 2023).
• Current book project: a monograph called Photo-texts From Below. Collectivist Dispatches from the 21st-Century French Margins, which looks at collectivism in photography alongside texts in French since the Millennium; appearing in Legenda Press’s ‘Visual Cultures’ series in 2025.

Recent journal and article publications

• ‘Pic, Théâtre, Légende : aux origines du photo-textualisme barthésien’, Revue Roland Barthes 6 (July 2023), Magali Nachtergael and Rodrigo Fontanari eds.
• ‘D’un confinement à un autre : comment représenter Roland Barthes au sanatorium 1942-1945 ?’ [Portuguese translation] in Márcio Venício Barbosa, François Weigel and Josilene Pinheiro-Mariz eds, Literatura e Doença (Campina Grande: editora de UFCG, Brazil, 2023)
• ‘Dead Time: The “Collectivist” Photobook in the Prison Work of Mohammed Bourouissa’, in Paul Edwards ed. The Photobook World: Artists’ Books and Forgotten Social Objects (Manchester UP 2023).
• ‘“Writing is an act, the poem a weapon, and discussion an assembly”. The Political Turn in Souffles during Morocco’s 1968,’ Forum for Modern Language Studies 59:3 (September 2023), special number on ‘Reviewing 1968: the wider lenses of the Cultural Review’, ed. Emma Wagstaff.
• ‘Undialectics: Marx and Hegel thinking through Roland Barthes’, French Forum 49:1 (December 2024).
• 'Petite mythologie du « mwa ». Roland Barthes, le non-barthésien’, in W. Shawn Temple ed, Connivences et Convergences avec Ralph Heyndels, Caen: Editions Traverse(s), 2024.
• 35 entries in the Dictionnaire Barthes, ed. Claude Coste, Paris: Honoré-Champion, 2024.

New research projects in preparation

• Global Barthes in World Literature – project supported by the British Academy.
• Conference in Paris on Aziz Chouaki in JUne 2026, co-organised with Ridha Boulaabi, Sylvie Brodziak, Yasmine Chouaki,.Corinne Francois-Deneve.

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