Girton College Huntingdon Road Cambridge CB3 0JG
Claire White joined the MMLL Faculty in 2017 as a University Lecturer. Before that, she held a lectureship at King’s College London (2016-17), and a Research Fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge (2012-16), having completed her Ph.D. at Clare College, Cambridge. As an undergraduate, Claire read French and German at Emmanuel College (2003-07). She attended various state schools in Bedfordshire and was the first in her family to attend university.
In the MMLL Faculty, Claire regularly convenes the final-year undergraduate paper on nineteenth-century French culture (FR11). She lectures across all parts of Tripos on writers such as Balzac, Mme de Duras, Flaubert, George Sand, the Goncourt brothers, and Zola, as well as on nineteenth-century painting.
Claire specialises in nineteenth-century French literature and art, with a particular interest in class, labour politics, aesthetics, and intellectual history. She is the author of Work and Leisure in Late Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). This book explores how writers and artists of the early Third Republic engaged critically with cultural, political and economic discourses on labour, leisure, and time at a key moment in the history of class struggle in France. She is also the co-editor of three publications: The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910: Authorial Work Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); a special number of the leading journal on Zola and Naturalism, Les Cahiers naturalistes (‘Zola au pluriel’, no. 91, 2017); and a special number of the journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, Dix-Neuf, on the poet Jules Laforgue (vol. 20, 2016). Her work has been awarded the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Larry Schehr Memorial Award and the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes’ Publication Prize.
Her latest book, Zola’s Dream: Idealism on Trial, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. The project explores how, and why, the popular naturalist writer was repeatedly drawn to the idealist imagination, both in its aesthetic and its political forms—and this in spite of his own loudly-proclaimed anti-idealism. It tracks the stakes of idealist thought in Zola’s writing, from his novel of socialism, Germinal (1885), to his transposition of the Drefyus Affair, Vérité (1903). How important was the ongoing 'quarrel', as Zola called it, between idealists and naturalists to what historians tend to call the ‘culture wars’ of the late nineteenth century? And what can a sustained attention to idealism in Zola's fiction tell us about the century's pre-eminent naturalist writer?
From 2019 to 2023 Claire was Associate Editor of the North American journal, Nineteenth-Century French Studies.
Claire has supervise PhD theses by Ellie Stefiuk (on ‘anarchism and the short story in fin-de-siècle France). and Ellamae Lepper (on hospitality and Salon cultures in July Monarchy fiction). She is currently supervising Isabel Maloney’s doctoral research on cultures of censorship under the Third Republic. Claire welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students with research interests relevant to her own.
Books (authored and edited):
Zola’s Dream: Idealism on Trial (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, 2025)
The Labour of Literature in Britain and France: Authorial Work Ethics, ed. Marcus Waithe and Claire White (Palgrave, 2018).
Work and Leisure in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Visual Culture: Time, Politics and Class (Palgrave, 2014).
Articles and Chapters:
'Émile Zola: État présent', forthcoming in French Studies (2025)
‘Pour la loi du nombre: George Sand et la République des paysans’, in Lendemains de défaite: 1870-1871 dans l’imaginaire de la IIIe République, ed. Marion Glaumaud-Carbonnier & Nicholas White (Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2024), pp. 103-15.
‘The Stench of the People: On the Mania for Zola’s L’Assommoir’, in Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work and Impressionism (Yale University Press, 2023), pp. 87-101.
‘The Affair Before the Affair: Zola, Dreyfus and the Lourdes Scandal’, French History, 35: 3 (2021), 375-97.
'Back to her Sheep: The Commune and Peasant Politics in George Sand's Nanon', Nineteenth-Century French Studies (special number on the Paris Commune), 49 (2021), 460-76.
‘The Republic of Novels: Politics and Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction’, in The Cambridge History of the Novel in French, ed. by Adam Watt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 403-20.
'Zola et Gissing: le Demos des deux côtés de la Manche', Les Cahiers naturalistes, 94 (2020), 131-42.
‘Patrie, peuple, amitié: George Sand and Jules Michelet on the Politics of Friendship’, Romanic Review, 110.1-4 (2019), 149-67.
‘George Sand, Digging’, in The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, ed. Waithe and White (2018), pp. 61-78.
‘Zola à rebours’, Les Cahiers naturalistes, 91 (2017), 123-34.
‘Laforgue, Beauvoir, and the Second Sex’, Dix-Neuf, 20 (2016), 110-24.
‘Easy Reading: Zola’s Kitsch’, in Lucidity: Essays in Honour of Alison Finch, ed. Ian James and Emma Wilson (Legenda: 2016), pp. 72-85.
‘Work Avoidance: Idleness and Ideology in Turn-of-The-Century Utopian Fiction’, Nottingham French Studies, 55 (2016), 46-61.
‘Sensuous Communism: Sand with Marx’, Comparative Literature, 67 (2015), 62-78; winner of the SDN Publication Prize.
‘Naturalism in extremis: Zola’s Le Rêve’, Romance Studies, 33 (2015), 272-84.
‘Zola and Freud: Spent Energy in Thérèse Raquin’, Romanic Review, 102:4 (2011), 349-68.
‘Labour of Love: George Sand’s La Ville noire and Émile Zola’s Travail’, Modern Language Review, 106 (2011), 697-708.
‘Rewriting Work and Leisure in Émile Zola’s Travail’, Dix-Neuf, 13 (2009), 55-70.
