Dr Larry Duffy

Dr Larry Duffy has a BA in Modern Languages (French and Russian) and an MA in European Languages and Culture from the University of Manchester, a Licence de Lettres Modernes from the Université de Bourgogne, and a PhD in French from the University of Hull. 

He has taught at universities in Ireland, Britain and Australia, and in 2010 came to Kent, where he is Senior Tutor and Chief Examiner in the Language Centre. He is External Examiner for French at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a member of the Executive Committees of the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France and of the Society for French Studies, and co-editor of the journal French Studies. 

Larry’s research interests lie mainly in the interplay between literary, scientific, and medical discourses in nineteenth-century France. Recent publications include peer-reviewed journal articles on medical themes in the works of Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, Joris-Karl Huysmans and Marcel Proust, and on Michel Houellebecq’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century articulations of nineteenth-century preoccupations. Forthcoming publications include articles on forensic toxicology in mid-nineteenth-century France, on Proust’s anticipatory problematisation of key themes in what is now known as medical humanities, and on Houellebecq’s representation of the hospital. 

Larry’s monograph Flaubert, Zola and the Incorporation of Disciplinary Knowledge was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. He has recently co-edited New Directions in Nineteenth-Century French Studies (2022), a book-length special double issue of the journal Dix-Neuf, of which he was co-editor 2018-24. He is currently co-editing (with Hannah Scott) a special issue of Dix-Neuf on medicine and culture in nineteenth-century France, and (with Steven Wilson) a volume of essays on critical intersectionalities in French studies and the medical humanities. He is a founder member of the French Studies Medical Humanities network. 

Larry is available to supervise PhD projects in the areas outlined above, and in related fields. Recently supervised and co-supervised PhD theses have been on the following topics: literary representations of women musicians in nineteenth-century France; science and the supernatural in the works of J.K. Huysmans; literature, architecture and sexuality at the fin de siècle; corruption in nineteenth-century French and twentieth-century North and West African fiction; regulation of female fertility and the maternal body in French medical and literary writing, 1870-1914; historicisation of the fantastic in the work of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam; readings of Heidegger by Paul Celan, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Louis Chrétien. Larry is currently co-supervising a project on representations of Maghrebi identity in modern French culture, and is part of a supervisory team on a multidisciplinary PhD project on decision design ecology in renal medicine.

Larry's undergraduate teaching is mostly centred on French literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present; he also teaches French language, grammar and translation.