Professor John Flower

About

Before coming to Kent, Professor John Flower held posts in England at the universities of Reading, East Anglia and Exeter, where he was Professor of French from 1976 to 1995, and in France at Paris-X Nanterre and Bordeaux III. He has also held numerous fellowships in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, and been the recipient of several major research awards.
John has published extensively in the UK and in France, with more than twenty single-authored books, seventy articles and invited contributions, and a dozen edited volumes. His work covers French literature and culture since the late nineteenth century, and focuses in particular on the life and work of François Mauriac, with an emphasis on a psychocritical approach which he inaugurated, and on literature and politics. 
He has also published a study of Joan of Arc as interpreted by novelists, poets, dramatists, composers and film producers, and  illustrated coffee-table guides to Provence, Lombardy and Burgundy with photographs by Charlie Waite. He continues to review widely, is a member of various editorial boards, and is the founding and general editor of the Journal of European Studies. In 2006 he organised at Kent the first major international conference on the work of Patrick Modiano, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014. Several of Professor Flower's doctoral students have gone on to pursue successful careers in academia.