Prof Max Silverman

Professor of French

0113 343 3486

Biography

Max Silverman was born and educated in North London. He was an undergraduate at the University of East Anglia (1971-75) and a postgraduate at the University of Kent (1976-1980). He was awarded his Ph.D. on the novels of Claude Simon in 1981.

After two years teaching in further and adult education in London he became a Lecturer in French at the University of Ulster in Coleraine (1983-5). He came to the University of Leeds in 1986 as Lecturer in French and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1994 and to Professor of Modern French Studies in 2000. He was Head of the Department of French from August 1999 to August 2002 and Director of the Centre for French and Francophone Cultural Studies from 2003-6.

His research and teaching are inter-disciplinary and range across the broad areas of culture and society in modern and contemporary France. His major specialisms are immigration, race, nation and citizenship; the city; Jewish cultural studies and Holocaust studies; cultural theory and debates; colonial and post-colonial theory and cultures. He has written two monographs, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France (Routledge, 1992, translated into German in 1994) and Facing Postmodernity: Contemporary French Thought on Culture and Society (Routledge, 1999). He has also edited a collection of essays under the title Race, Discourse and Power in France (Avebury, 1991) and Frantz Fanon's Peau noire, masques blancs (Manchester University Press, 2005). In addition, he has published numerous chapters in books and journal articles on the above topics.

He has supervised a number of research students for the degrees of MA by research and Ph.D. He is keen to supervise research students wishing to work in any of the fields relating to his specialisms, especially: new racisms and nationalisms, intellectual debates on culture, representations of the city, Jewish writing in France, representing the Holocaust, postmodern identities, new citizenship.

From September 2007 he will be engaged in a 4-year AHRC-funded project with Professor Griselda Pollock on 'Concentrationary Memories and the Politics of Representation.