Dr Edmund Birch
- College Lecturer, Churchill College
- College Lecturer, Selwyn College
Contact
Location
- Churchill College, Storey's Way, Cambridge, CB3 0DS
About
Edmund Birch’s research interests are centred on the literature and cultural history of nineteenth-century France. His work focuses on the novel and the press in the context of the cultural and political history of the period. He has written on a range of authors including Honoré de Balzac, Delphine de Girardin, Alexandre Dumas, Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant, and is also interested in comparative literature, having published on the connections between British and French fiction. His first book Fictions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century France (2018) was a study of the French novel of journalism, and he is co-editor of Literature and the Press in France, a special number of the journal Dix-Neuf (2017). This volume brings together researchers from Europe and North America in a series of essays on the relations between literary and journalistic culture across the nineteenth century. His articles have appeared in PMLA, French Studies, Romanic Review, Flaubert. Revue critique et génétique and other journals. At present, he is working on a book about empire, nationhood and the press in the novels of Alexandre Dumas, and writing the introduction to a new edition of Flaubert’s Three Tales.
Edmund studied French and German at Cambridge, where he remained to do postgraduate research on French literature, completing a PhD in 2015. Before taking up his current post, he was a Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He is co-editor of Dix-Neuf, a Taylor & Francis journal dedicated to publishing new research on French literature, visual culture and cultural history, and has contributed to the BBC Radio programmes In Our Time and Opening Lines. Edmund’s research has earned prizes from the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association and the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes. In 2024, he was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for his work on Dumas.
Research
Published works:
‘”Royauté collective”: Journaux et journalistes chez Delphine de Girardin’, forthcoming in Unheimliche Codes, Kanäle und Apparaturen: Medienreflexion und Mediengewalt in französischsprachigen Literaturen, ed. by K. Hahn, M. Hausmann and M. Liebermann (Transcript Verlag, 2024)
‘Journalism and Realist Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France’, in The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms, ed. by Katherine Bowers and Margarita Vaysman (Oxford University Press, 2024)
‘Alexandre Dumas père, prophète de la défaite’, in Lendemains de défaite : 1870-71 dans l’imaginaire la IIIe République, ed. by M. Glaumaud-Carbonnier and N. White (Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2024), pp. 173-84
‘Alexandre Dumas’s Odyssey: Race, Slavery, Narrative’, PMLA, 137.5 (2022), 809-23
‘Reading the News, from Maupassant to Freud’, French Studies, 76.1 (2022), 36-51
‘“L’immobile et banal aspect des choses”: Journalisme et désœuvrement dans L’Éducation sentimentale’, Flaubert médiatique, ed. by Marie-Astrid Charlier and Marie-Ève Thérenty, Flaubert. Revue critique et génétique, 22 (2021)
‘Friends Among Enemies: Dumas’s Musketeers’, Romanic Review, 110 (2019), 111-30
Fictions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century France (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); reviewed in French Studies, H-France, Modern & Contemporary France, Modern Language Review, La Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France
‘Literary Machines: George Gissing’s Lost Illusions’, in The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1930: Authorial Work Ethics, ed. by Marcus Waithe and Claire White (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 187-201
Literature and the Press in France, special number of Dix-Neuf, co-edited by Edmund Birch and Kate Rees, 21.4 (2017), 223-388
‘“Les suites des suites”: Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and the News’, Dix-Neuf, 21 (2017), 297-311
‘Maupassant’s Bel-Ami and the Secrets of Actualité’, Modern Language Review, 109 (2014), 996-1012
‘Keys: Press and Privacy in the Goncourts’ Charles Demailly’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 42 (2014), 206-20
Book reviews in French Studies, Journal of European Studies, Modern Language Review, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, Romanic Review