Seán Hand

Professor Seán Hand is currently seconded to be Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Europe) of the University of Warwick. In this capacity he is an academic leader of the EUTOPIA European-funded university alliance. In 2014-16 he was Head of Warwick's School of Modern Languages and Cultures, and in 2008-2011 he was Head of the Department of French Studies. He joined the University of Warwick as a Professor of French Studies in 2005.

He is a member of the Academia Europaea, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is an Honorary Professorial Fellow of Zhejiang University, and a Scientific Advisory Board member at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He has been an Honorary Professor of Monash University, a Visiting Fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and a Visiting Fellow at the National University of Singapore.

He has been an assessor for the AHRC, the European Science Foundation, the Irish Research Council, the Israel Science Foundation, and the South African National Research Foundation, and a Vice-Chair of the MSCA Individual Fellowships competition. He chairs the Warwick Ukraine Working Group. He also supports a number of social mobility foundations and arts charities.

Academic interests

Seán Hand's teaching covers literature, ideas and related developments from the early twentieth century to the present day, in both a French and a more international context. He invites applications to work with him at doctoral or post-doctoral level. His research examines writings in French of the past 100 years. He published the first two monographs in English on the autobiography, ethnography and criticism of Michel Leiris.

He then brought the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to a wider audience through translations, a Reader, a collection of critical essays, and a monograph. He has also edited and introduced a collection of new essays on post-Holocaust France and the Jews, published on Derrida, Duras, Grimbert, Jabès, Lacan, Nancy, postmodernism, Jewish writing and historiography, and translated into English a number of philosophical works written in French.

Qualifications

• B.A. (M.A. Oxon), D.Phil. Oxford. MBA, D.Litt. Warwick.