Professor Susan R Harrow

Susan Harrow is Ashley Watkins Professor of French. She joined Bristol in 2007 from an established professorship at the University of Sheffield.  Her research and teaching interests lie in the later-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially poetry and the novel with a particular focus on the interrelation of literary modernism and visual culture. The author of four published monographs, she wrote The Material, the Real and the Fractured Self: Subjectivity and Representation from Rimbaud to Réda (University of Toronto Press, 2004) and published Colourworks: Chromatic Innovation in Modern French Poetry (2020) with Bloomsbury Academic Press: <https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/colourworks-9781350182202/>), which was jointly awarded the R. Gapper Book Prize (2021) by the Society for French Studies. The paperback edition of Colourworks: Chromatic Innovation in Modern French Poetry was released by Bloomsbury in 2023. Following Zola; La Curée (University of Glasgow, 1998), she published Zola, the Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation (Legenda, 2010, recently re-issued in paperback). Her fifth monograph, on epistolarity and the letters of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Nerthe Morisot, Mallarmé, and Zola, supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, will appear in October 2025 with Cambridge University Press.  Her current book project is a cultural geo-history of Guillaume Apollinaire supported by the award of a University of Bristol Research Fellowship (2023–24).  She has served as a Strategic Reviewer at AHRC and as a member of the REF 2021 Sub-Panel for Modern Languages and Linguistics and also as an Interdisciplinary Advisor to the Sub-Panel.  She is Deputy Chair of the Sub-Panel for Modern Languages and Linguistics for REF 2029.  She was elected President of the Society for French Studies (2010-12), the longest-established and largest association in French studies. In 2011 she was awarded the rank of Officier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques for services to French culture. She is currently serving as the President of the Zola Society of Great Britain.  In May 2025, Susan became General Editor of the major Legenda imprint (MHRA), overseeing its ten book series. She has appeared several times as an expert on BBC Radio, most recently on the flagship programme 'In Our Time'. In Spring and Summer 2025, she took up a Distinguished Research Fellowship at the Université de Grenoble-Alpes. 

Teaching

Increasingly, undergraduates are keen to extend their studies into Postgraduate work, with all the intellectual, personal and professional benefits this brings. Susan Harrow has supervised to successful completion PhDs including studies of French modernist poetry (Max Jacob); the significance of glass in c19th literature and culture;  c19th representations of the Sahara in text and image; and has co-supervised a practice-based PhD on the translation of landscape writing. Recent and current PhD co-supervision includes studies of colour in the theatre of Lorca and epistolarity in Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett. She would be delighted to hear from prospective postgraduates (that is, undergraduates at any stage) who are keen to pursue projects in the areas of later-nineteenth- and earlier-twentieth-century French literature and inter-disciplinary studies, possibly with a visual culture component. She contributes to the MA unit on Visual Culture: Text and Image.

Her specialist Undergraduate units are all interdisciplinary in nature and involve narrative, poetry, visual culture, theatre, and critical thought:

• FREN 20041: Paris 1857–1897: Image and Text
• FREN 30096: Around Cubism
• FREN 30040: Surrealism: Disruptive Desire in Textual and Visual Culture