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 most recent book on Barthes, I have written a blog: ‘A Sensitive, Avid and Silent Political Subject’: Roland Barthes, Politics-Polemics-Pandemics – Anthem Press Blog.

I have just published a new book on the contemporary photo-text in French which looks at how language (of all sorts) is used to inflect and politically commit the striking range of images. It considers ‘people on the move’ (illegal migrants and refugees) in the photo-textual work of Aziz Chouaki, Mathieu Pernot, Yto Barrada; 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; on the care sector during the pandemic in the work of Géraldine Aresteanu, 24h en Réa; and the work place in Charles Féger’s photographic projects.

Photo-texts From Below: Collectivist Dispatches from the 21st-Century French Margins - Andy Stafford

See the interview I have given about the book:

MHRA News - The Eloquent Picture

Global Roland Barthes

I am currently working on a project called Global Roland Barthes, with colleagues in Brazil, China, France, Germany, Japan, Morocco, USA. Our Early Career symposium, held in Leeds in June 2025, brought together a range of young researchers working on divers aspects of Barthes’s writing. The papers are due to appear in the 2027 number of Barthes Studies (no. 13):

CONFERENCE REPORT: ‘Global Barthes’ — An Early Career Researchers’ Symposium | Barthes Studies

My new book project is on the insurgency in Morocco in the early 1970s in which I aim to tracve the links between the radical Moroccan journal Souffles (in the work of Abdellatif Laabi and Abraham Serfaty) and the insurrrectional events during Morocco’s years of lead.

• Global Roland Barthes

Professional memberships

• SFPS; BCLA

Research groups and institutes

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

Current postgraduate researchers

• Isla Paterson