Liverpool University Press is delighted to announce that Professor Derek Schilling will be joining the Editorial Board of Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures.

Derek Schilling is Professor of French at Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches courses in modern and contemporary literature and film and directs the Centre pluridisciplinaire Louis Marin. He holds a co-ordinated doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and the Université Paris 8. His chief research domain is geopoetics and geocriticism, specifically the relation of the literary and filmic record to the history of town planning and suburbanisation in France since 1900. In Mémoires du quotidien: les lieux de Perec (Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2006) he explored Perec’s sociology of everydayness in relation to the rhetoric of the memory place and various site-bound observational practices. A forthcoming study, Banlieues de mémoire: géopoétique du roman de l’entre-deux-guerres, examines the emergence of the Paris suburb as a leading chronotope in novels published at the turn of the 1930s, by the likes of Simenon, Céline, Queneau, Dabit, and Berberova.

A scholar of documentary and fiction film, Schilling published in 2007 the comprehensive monograph Eric Rohmer in Manchester UP’s “French Film Directors” series. His most recent film-related publication, co-edited with Philippe Met, is Screening the Paris suburbs: from the silent era to the 1990s (Manchester UP 2018). Its fifteen contributors address the long history of representations of greater Paris, delving into tropes of escape, alienation, local struggle, criminality and stigmatisation. Other recent articles explore the work on René Vautier; place names in Georges Perec’s fiction; Louis Malle’s direct cinema of the 1970s; and plant closure documentaries and the memory of labour in the new millennium (“France’s Labour Lost,” forthcoming in France in Flux, eds. Ari Blatt and Edward Welch, Liverpool UP 2019). Schilling is a member of several editorial boards of journals in the United States including French Forum, French Review, MLN, Symposium and, in France, the Revue des Sciences Humaines.

Charles Forsdick, James Barrow Professor of French at University of Liverpool and Series Editor of CFFC, said, “We are delighted to welcome Professor Derek Schilling as a new member of the editorial board of Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures. Derek is one of the leading international specialists on modern and contemporary French literature and culture, particularly well known for his extensive work on geocriticism and the relationship of literature and film to space and urbanisation in France since 1900. A specialist on authors such as Simenon, Céline, Queneau and Perec, he has also published widely on contemporary French film. Derek joins us as we celebrate the publication of the 50th title in the series and will offer invaluable advice and support as we commission our next 50 volumes mapping out the major movements and tendencies in twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and Francophone cultures.”

If you would like to submit a book proposal to the series please get in touch with Chloe Johnson at chloe.johnson@liverpool.ac.uk. You can find out more about the series here.