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Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics

 

Prof Jean Khalfa

Jean Khalfa
Position(s): 
Trinity Professor in French Studies
Department/Section: 
French
Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics
Contact details: 
Telephone number: 
(+44) (0)1223 338468
College: 
Location: 

Trinity College 
Trinity Street 
Cambridge  
CB2 1TQ

 

About: 

Jean Khalfa specialises in the history of philosophy, modern literature (in particular contemporary poetry and writing in French from North Africa and the Caribbean), aesthetics and anthropology. He is the Editor of What is Intelligence? (CUP, 1994 and 1996); Afrique du sud: le cap de bonne espérance (with Chris Alden, Les Temps Modernes, 1995); The New French Poetry, a Bilingual Anthology (with David Kelley, Bloodaxe Books, 1996); The Dialogue between Painting and Poetry (Black Apollo Press, 2001); An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze(Continuum, 2003); Frantz Fanon, a special issue of Wasafiri No 44 (Routledge, 2005); Pour Frantz Fanon, a special edition of Les Temps Modernes, No 635-636 (Gallimard, 2006); the first complete edition of Michel Foucault's History of Madness (Routledge, 2006 and 2009). An interview on Fanon is available at http://www.rfi.fr/francais/radio/editions/072/edition_53_20060219.asp. He has recently published articles on Pascal, Rousseau, Deleuze, Sartre, Fanon, Césaire, St John Perse, Glissant, Michaux, Cavaillès, Maccheroni, Roche, on typographic forms and on the relationship between contemporary poetry and the image. Several broadcasts and press articles on his edition of Fanon's collected writings, Écrits sur l'aliénation et la liberté (Jean Khalfa and Robert Young, ed., La Découverte, 2015 and 2019 and Hibr, Algiers, 2015; English translation: Bloomsbury, 2018, 2020) are available here: 

His Poetics of the Antilles: Poetry, History and Philosophy in the Writings of Perse, Césaire, Fanon and Glissant was published in 2017 by Peter Lang: https://www.peterlang.com/view/product/45081. He is working on a book on Fanon's Les Damnés de la terre (for Routledge) and a study of Foucault on insanity. He is a member of Livre Espace de Création, a programme of the French Agence Nationale de La Recherche, which digitised a significant selection of livres d'artistes from the Jacques Doucet collection and published several studies on the book as a space of creativity in the twentieth century (http://lec.hypotheses.org/presentation). Within this programme he has coedited Les Espaces du livre/Spaces of the Book with Isabelle Choi (Peter Lang, 2015). He is the organiser of the Choiseul-Praslin Lectures and exhibitions, focusing on the relationship between poetry and image, a member of the Comité de Rédaction of Les Temps Modernes, a member of the editorial board of Wasafiri and Series Editor, Modern French Identities, Peter Lang Publishers. In 2013-14 he held a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship and is a Officier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

Professor Khalfa welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students with research interests relevant to his interests.