Overview

I am Director of the Bernardin de Saint-Pierre Correspondence Project, funded by the AHRC, the British Academy ( the project has British Academy Research Project status), the MHRA. The Correspondence is being published in Oxford and will form part of the Electronic Enlightenment project, to be distributed worldwide by Oxford University Press. The Bernardin corpus is massive (nearly 3000 letters) and the edition will radically change our perception of this important figure. In the letters we see Bernardin as an author, of course, but also as a scientist, an administrator, a line manager, a husband and father and an individual fighting for the literary rights of his fellow authors. The correspondence will interest a wide variety of readers: specialists of the French Enlightenment, of course, but also those interested in the history of science, the politics of the French Revolution, social history and even art history. We are also working on a new edition of the the complete works of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre that is being published by Garnier in Paris.

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Research

I am working principally on the Bernardin correspondence, editing letters and checking letters prepared by other members of the editorial team. The Bernardin project is the first 'born-digital' project forming part of the Electronic Enlightenment. My longer term plans involve preparing a critical inventory of the entire collection of Bernardin manuscripts in the Bibliothèque municipale du Havre.

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Supervision

Research students

Postgraduate Supervision since 2001

• PhD on 'The novels of Pigault-Lebrun', Anne Serfaty, 2000-2003.
• MPhil on 'The novels of Madame Riccoboni', Evangelina Bournou, 2001-2003.
• MPhil  on ‘Science in the Mémoires secrets', Jean Luck, part-time, 2002-2005.
• MPhil on 'A study of family papers from the SW of France', Angela Whitehead, part-time, 2002-2005.
• PhD on 'Women's Memoir Writing at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries', Madeleine Percival, AHRB funded, 2002-2006.
• PhD on 'The editorial work of Louis-Aimé Martin, the first editor of the complete works of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre', funded by the AHRC as part of the large Bernardin grant, Stephanie Darrie, 2005-

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More information

Conference Organisation

• Critique, Critiques au 18e siècle, University of Exeter, September 2004.

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