Patrick O'Donovan

My interest in French is centred on modern and contemporary literature and thought. At present, the large-scale projects on which I'm engaged extend over two main areas. First, the implications for our understanding of modernity of the distinct ways in which it is conceptualized in the literature and the thought of Benjamin Constant. And second, fiction and poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Writers on whom I'm working just now include Vigny and Proust. In particular, I am working on architecture in the Recherche and Proust as architect.

I am Professor of French Emeritus, having served in the Professorship of French in UCC from 1994 to 2024. I have served for several periods as Head of the Department of French, and have also been Head of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. From 2015 to 2017, I was Head of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences. 

I am a graduate of UCC, where I obtained an M.A. I also studied in the Université de Paris-Sorbonne and in the University of Cambridge, where I was a member of Jesus College and where I obtained a Ph.D. I taught for a time in the University of Dundee and then in St John's College, Oxford. I was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, from 1989 to 1994.

I have had a number of other research and scholarly responsibilities. I am a former editor of the journal French Studies and am now a member of its Advisory Board. I am also a former President of the Association d'Études Françaises et Francophones d'Irlande, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Irish Journal of French Studies.

I have also been a member of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. I was founding Chairperson of the Irish Humanities Alliance in 2013–14, and was convener of the group that produced By Imagination We Live: A Strategy for the Humanities, 2020–2030. From 2016 to 2019, I was a member of the board of the European Alliance for the Social Sciences and the Humanities.

• Realism and modernity: literature and political thought in the nineteenth century (comparatively)
• French political thought since 1789
• French poetry (Vigny, Mallarmé, Bonnefoy)
• French fiction (Constant, Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Proust, Beckett) 
• Contemporary French thought and theory (Barthes, Certeau, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Le Doeuff, among others)
  

Research mentorship 
 
Mentor to Dr Richard Mason, Government of Ireland Post-Doctoral Fellow working on institutional pedagogy (2018–19; now Lecturer in French, Queen Mary, University of London) 
 
Mentor to Dr Lucy O’Meara, Government of Ireland Post-Doctoral Fellow working on Roland Barthes’s teaching in the Collège de France (2009-10; now Senior Lecturer in French, University of Kent) 
 
Mentor to Dr Sucheta Kapoor, Government of Ireland Post-Doctoral Fellow working on monstrosity in Flaubert (2008-09; subsequently Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Liverpool)