Department of French

Department of French

   

Jean Khalfa specialises in 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, on typographic forms and on the relationship between contemporary poetry and the image.

He is working on a book on francophone thought and poetry, on the collected writings of Frantz Fanon (with Robert Young) and on 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, aimed at digitising a significant selection of livres d'artistes from the Jacques Doucet collection and leading a reflection on the function of the book as a space of creativity in the twentieth century (http://lec.hypotheses.org/presentation). 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 a trustee of the Cambridge Film Trust.