Dr Larry Duffy

Dr Larry Duffy has a BA in Modern Languages (French and Russian) and an MA in European Languages and Culture from the University of Manchester, a Licence de Lettres Modernes from the Université de Bourgogne, and a PhD in French from the University of Hull.

He has taught at universities in Ireland, Britain and Australia, and in 2010 came to Kent, where he is Director of Undergraduate Studies in Modern Languages, and Senior Tutor in the Division of Arts and Humanities. He is External Examiner for French at the University of Nottingham and at Birkbeck, University of London.

Larry’s research interests lie mainly in the interplay between literary, scientific, and medical discourses in nineteenth-century France. Recent publications include peer-reviewed journal articles on medical themes in the works of Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, Joris-Karl Huysmans and Marcel Proust, and on Michel Houellebecq’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century articulations of nineteenth-century preoccupations. Forthcoming publications include articles on forensic toxicology in mid-nineteenth-century France, on Proust’s articulation of nineteenth-century scientific and medical themes, on Proust’s anticipatory problematisation of key themes in what is now known as Health Humanities, and on Rachilde’s engagement with the doctor-patient encounter.

Larry’s monograph Flaubert, Zola and the Incorporation of Disciplinary Knowledge was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. He has recently co-edited New Directions in Nineteenth-Century French Studies (2022), a book-length special double issue of the journal Dix-neuf, of which he has been co-editor since 2018. He is a member (since 2014) of the Executive Committee of the Society of Dix-neuviémistes. He is a founder member of the French Studies Medical Humanities network.

Larry is available to supervise PhD projects in these and similar areas. Recently supervised and co-supervised PhD theses have been on the following topics: literary representations of women musicians in nineteenth-century France; science and the supernatural in the works of J.K. Huysmans; literature, architecture and sexuality at the fin de siècle; corruption in nineteenth-century French and twentieth-century North and West African fiction; regulation of female fertility and the maternal body in French medical and literary writing, 1870-1914; historicisation of the fantastic in the work of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Larry is currently co-supervising a project on readings of Heidegger by Levinas and Chrétien, and is part of a supervisory team on a multidisciplinary PhD project on decision design ecology in renal medicine, funded under the University of Kent’s Future Human Signature Research Theme.

Larry's undergraduate teaching is mostly centred on French literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present; he also teaches French language, grammar and translation.

His teaching on MA programmes focuses on the interaction between literary and medical discourses in nineteenth-century France, and on theoretical approaches to cultural production.