1. Profile
Professor Andy Stafford

Professor Andy Stafford

  • Position: Professor of French and Critical Theory
  • Areas of expertise: Critical theory, especially the work of Roland Barthes; the photo-text; African and Caribbean literature, politics and historiography; the essay and other short forms.
  • Email: A.J.Stafford@leeds.ac.uk
  • Phone: +44(0)113 343 3498
  • Location: 1.20 Michael Sadler

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

Postgraduate research opportunities

We welcome enquiries from motivated and qualified applicants from all around the world who are interested in PhD study. Our research opportunities allow you to search for projects and scholarships.