2000 - Institute of Linguists Diploma in Translation (options in Literary Translation and Humanities)

1998 - PhD 'Gender, Politics and Fiction in 1930s France', University of Nottingham

1994 - MA in 20th Century French Studies (Distinction), University of Nottingham

1993 - BA (Hons) French Studies (First Class, with Swiss Embassy Prize for French), University of Nottingham

Originally from the North West of England, I studied at the University of Nottingham where I completed a B.A in French Studies, followed by an M.A. in Twentieth Century French Studies and a PhD entitled ‘Gender, Politics and Fiction in 1930s France’, under the supervision of Professor Rosemary Chapman. Before being appointed at Birmingham, I lectured at Leeds University, St Anne’s College, Oxford and Aston University.

I teach a range of undergraduate courses on the politics and culture of twentieth century France, including an option entitled ‘Before and After Vichy: Conflicts and Cultures in France, 1930-1944’. I also teach translation and translation studies at final year undergraduate and postgraduate level.

I have recently supervised PhD students working on projects on France and the Second World War, and French travel writing. I am also happy to supervise projects on topics relating to literature and the interwar period 1919-1939, literature and the Second World War, French women's writing, and literary translation and reception.

My main research interest is in the field of French political fiction of the inter-war years. I have written a monograph on the female-authored political roman à these of the 1930s, and have published various articles related to this topic. This book studies the work of five little-known female authors (Simone Téry, Edith Thomas, Madeleine Pelletier, Henriette Valet and Louise Weiss) who used fiction in various ways as a means to explore and express leftist political commitment.

As a development of this research, I have recently published a monograph on Irène Némirovsky, whose previously unpublished Occupation novel Suite française gained a wide readership in 2004 when it appeared in French, and soon in numerous translations. My book, entitled Before Auschwitz: Irène Némirovsky and the Literary Landscape of Inter-war France, [publication launch video] seeks to place Némirovsky’s œuvre as a whole within the context of inter-war French literary production in order to demonstrate the ways in which her identity as a literary star of the 1930s led her to produce a work such as Suite française. It seeks to counter potentially anachronistic readings of Némirovsky’s literary choices which approach her life and work retrospectively, that is, from the perspective of the Occupation period. It also investigates the contemporary reception of Suite française in terms of ongoing processes of memorialisation of the Vichy period.

Other research interests include travel writing and Translation Studies. I am particularly interested in the phenomenon of the politically-motivated journey to the USSR between the wars, which I approach from a comparative perspective. Having previously researched the trajectories of French and British women who undertook such journeys, I am now also focusing on a comparison between journeys to the USSR and to other 'totalitarian' regimes in this period.  My research in Translation Studies arose from my teaching, and has been consolidated by my interest in the reception of Suite française in translation in the UK. I am currently working on a project on the translation of French fiction about the Second World War.

I am a member of the Women in French network, and have co-edited two volumes resulting from the activities of this organisation. I am on the editorial board of Key Words, the journal of the Raymond Williams Society. I acted as secretary of the UK Sartre Society between 2007-2009. At Birmingham, I am involved in the Centre for Second World War Studies, the Centre for Cultural Modernity and the Memory Studies and Translation Studies research groups. I am a member of the British Comparative Literature Association.

Sole authored books

• Before Auschwitz: Irene Némirovsky and the Literary Landscape of Inter-war France (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2010). [publication launch video]
  Discussed at http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Les-ambiguites-d-Irene-Nemirovsky.html (see http://www.booksandideas.net/The-Ambiguities-of-Irene.html?lang=en for English version)
• Forgotten Engagements: Women, Literature and the Left in 1930s France (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).

Edited collections

• Global Landscapes of Translation, special issue of Translation Studies, ed. and with an introduction by Angela Kershaw and Gabriela Saldanha (forthcoming, 2013).
• Parcours de femmes. Twenty Years of Women in French, ed. and with an introduction by Maggie Allison and Angela Kershaw (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011).
• Women in Europe Between the Wars: Politics, Culture, Society, ed. and with and introduction by Angela Kershaw and Angela Kimyongür (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
• The Impossible Space. Explorations of Utopia in French Writing. Strathclyde Modern Language Studies (New Series) No.6, 2004, ed. and with an introduction by Angela Kershaw, Hélène Stafford and Pamela Moores.

Articles in refereed journals

• 'Complexity and Unpredictability in Cultural Flows: Two French Holocaust Novels in English Translation', Translation Studies (forthcoming).
• (with Gabriela Saldanha): 'Global Landscapes of Translation', Translation Studies 6.2 (2013), 1-15.  
• 'Intertextuality and Translation in Three Recent French Holocaust Novels', in special issue of Translation and Literature  ed by Peter Davies (March 2014)
• 'History of a Success: Irène Némirovsky’s Posthumous Reputation, 1944 – 2004', Journal of War and Culture Studies 4.1 (2011), 79-95.
• ‘Sociology of Literature, Sociology of Translation: The Reception of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française in France and Britain’, Translation Studies 3.1 (2010), 1-16
• ‘Simone Téry: Writing the History of the Present in 1930s France’, Feminist Review 85.1 (June 2007), 8-20 (special edition ed. by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn on ‘Hystorical Fictions’)
• ‘Finding Irène Némirovsky’, French Cultural Studies 18.1 (February 2007), 59-81.
• ‘French and British Female Intellectuals and the Soviet Union. The Journey to the USSR, 1929-1942’, E-Revue d’études anglophones 4.2 (Autumn 2006), 62-72. http://www.e-rea.org/
• ‘Gender, Sexuality and Politics in Paul Nizan’s La Conspiration’, Modern Language Review 98.1 (2003), 27-43.
• ‘The Body of the Hero in French Political Fiction of the 1930s’, Nottingham French Studies 41.2 (2002), 47-60.
• ‘Autodidacticism and Criminality in Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée and Edith Thomas’s L’Homme criminel’, Modern Language Review 96.3 (2001), 679-92.
• ‘Louise Weiss: Fin de siècle chez une femme du siècle’, Romance Studies 18.1 (June 2000), 45-55.
• ‘Lettre à moi-même: The Political Memoirs of Edith Thomas’, French Studies Bulletin 71 (Summer 1999), 4-6.

Chapters in books

• 'Une compagne de route: Edith Thomas, Agency and the Constraints of Communist Engagement' in Politics and the Individual: French Experiences, 1930-1950, ed by Jessica Wardhaugh (Oxford: Legenda), forthcoming.
• ‘La représentation de l’occupant dans les écrits d’Irène Némirovsky, 1940-1942’  in L’Allemagne, la France et l’Ordre Nouveau: un travail sur le passé. Approches littéraires et politiques (Leipziger Universitätsverlag, série “Deutsch-Französische Kulturbibliothek”), forthcoming.
• ‘Reading Némirovsky Now: Resistant Representations of the Second World War in Contemporary French Literature’ in Readings in Twenty-First-Century Literatures ed by Margaret-Anne Hutton, Michael Gratzke and Claire Whitehead (Oxford: Peter Lang, forthcoming).
• 'Les intertextes anglais de Suite française: Irène Némirovsky, lectrice de E.M. Forster et Percy Lubbock', Actes du colloque les Ecrivains théoriciens de la littérature, 1920-1940, ed by Bruno Curatolo and Julia Peslier (forthcoming).
• 'Suite française, un roman français du 21ième siècle', Actes du colloque Après Vichy: l'écriture occupée, ed by Marc Dambre (Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, forthcoming).
• ‘Ficitons of Testimony: Irène Némirovsky and Suite française’ in Framing Narratives of the Second World War and Occupation in France: New Readings, ed. by Margaret Atack and Christopher Lloyd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, Durham Modern Language Series, 2012)
• ‘For lust of knowing what should not be known’: Ella Maillart, Ethel Mannin and the Journey to Russia in the 1930s’ in Parcours de femmes: Twenty Years of Women in French, ed. by Maggie Allison and Angela Kershaw (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), pp.273-290.
• ‘Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942): Une Russe française, une Française russe?’ in Ecrivains franco-russes ed. by Murielle Lucie Clément (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), pp.109-120.
• ‘French and British Female Intellectuals and the Soviet Union. The Journey to the USSR, 1929-1942’ in Right/Left/Right: Revolving Commitments. France and Britain, 1929-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), pp.105-122.
• ‘Women’s Writing and the Creation of Political Subjectivities in Inter-war France. Louise Weiss: Novelist, Autobiographer and Journalist’ in Women in Europe Between the Wars: Politics, Culture, Society, ed. and with and introduction by Angela Kershaw and Angela Kimyongür (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp.55-72.
• ‘Proletarian Women, Proletarian Writing: The Case of Marguerite Audoux’ in A Belle Epoque? Women in French Society and Culture, ed. by Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr  (Oxford: Berghahn, 2006), pp.253-68.
• ‘Disease, Decay and Dread: Literary Constructions of Illness’ in Representing Health: Discourses of Health and Illness in the Media (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), ed. by Martin King and Katherine Watson, pp.252-69.
• ‘L’écriture prolétarienne d’une fille du terroir’ in Le Terroir de Marguerite Audoux. Actes du Colloque organisé par l’équipe Littérature et Histoire, Université d’Orléans, 30 octobre 2004, (Paris: Editons L’Harmattan, 2005), sous la direction de Bernard-Marie Garreau, pp.164-210.
• ‘Utopia and Dystopia in the Work of Madeleine Pelletier’ in The Impossible Space. Explorations of Utopia in French Writing. Strathclyde Modern Language Studies (New Series) No.6, 2004, ed. and with an introduction by Angela Kershaw, Hélène Stafford and Pamela Moores, pp. 145-79. http://sapiens.strath.ac.uk/smls/smls6/smls6contents.html
• ‘Utopian Pessimism in Madeleine Pelletier’s Une vie nouvelle’ in La Nature Dévoilée: French Literary Responses to Science, ed. by Larry Duffy and Catherine Emerson (Hull: Hull University Press, 2000), pp.139-48.
• ‘Homosexuality and Transgression in Three Political Novels of the 1930s’ in Lieux Interdits: Transgression and French Literature, ed. by Larry Duffy and Adrian Tudor (Hull: Hull University Press, 1998), pp. 219-34.