Overview

I am Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor (DPVC) for the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Prior to this I was Associate Dean for Research and Impact for the College of Humanities (2021-22), Head of Modern Languages and Cultures (2018-21) and Director of Research for the department (2014-18).

As DPVC I have oversight and line-management responsibilty for the Law School, the School of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences Cornwall, Languages, Cultures & Visual Studies, and Classics, Ancient History, Religion and Theology. I co-chair our Faculty Wellbeing, Inclusion & Culture Board and chair the University Arts & Culture Board and Assurance Group. I also sit on the Board of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum.

Since 2022 I have been a trustee on the Board of Exeter UNESCO City of Literature (ExCoL): see https://www.exetercityofliterature.com/about-who-we-are. Part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, ExeterCoL works to increase literary and storytelling activity across Devon, engaging organisations and people in the region’s literary life, and sharing Exeter and Devon’s stories with the world.

I am currently honorary secretary of the Association of University Professors and Heads of French (AUPHF+) and am a member of the French Studies Editorial Board.  

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Research

I am editor of a major collective work, The Cambridge History of the Novel in French, published in February 2021. This edited volume consists of forty commissioned chapters by international specialists, spanning from the late medieval period to the present day. There has been no such work, aiming at comprehensiveness of coverage, since George Saintsbury's two-volume History of the French Novel (1917-19). One hundred years on, this project aims to address this peculiar gap in scholarship. You can read a blog about my motivations in producing this huge work here: http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2021/01/professor-adam-watt-discusses-his-motivation-and-approach-to-editing-the-cambridge-history-of-the-novel-in-french/

I also recently edited a Festschrift for Prof. Eddie Hughes FBA, that appeared with Legenda in October 2022: https://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Labours-Attention. A recent invited talk on Proust, delivered at the Collège de France in January 2023 can be accessed here: https://www.college-de-france.fr/fr/agenda/colloque/proust-ecrivain/une-severe-discipline-interieure-ecrivain-apres-le-prix-goncourt

My previous research has focussed primarily on the life and work of Marcel Proust (1871-1922). My first book, Reading in Proust's 'A la recherche': 'le délire de la lecture' (Oxford University Press, 2009) is a study of the important and often destabilising role played by scenes of reading in Proust's novel. The US journal French Review stated that the book ‘has many qualities, not the least of which is completeness’, and the online journal O-Scholars remarked that ‘There is so much to praise in [the book] that one doesn’t quite know where to begin.’ My second book was The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which is the most up-to-date introduction to Proust available and is widely recommended on undergraduate syllabi; H-France Review described it as ‘punctuated with successes.’ I published an illustrated biography of Proust in Reaktion Books' 'Critical Lives' series in 2013. Here I seek to give an account of how Proust came to write A la recherche, engaging at once with his correspondence and existing biographical and critical work in the field. Reviews have described the book as 'excellent' (The Age, Australia) and 'amazing' (Gay & Lesbian Review). It was published in Chinese translation with Lijiang Publishing in 2014. The TLS review of the book can be accessed here: http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1344921.ece. H-France Review described the book as 'the finest short biography of Proust in print today'.

I have contributed numerous chapters and articles to various journals and edited collections, many of these taking a comparative approach. Following an international conference I organised in 2007 I edited a collection of essays in English and French entitled Le Temps retrouvé Eighty Years After/80 ans après: Critical Essays/Essais critiques (Peter Lang, 2009); another major conference in 2013, celebrating the centenary of the first volume of Proust's novel led to a special number of Marcel Proust Aujourd'hui edited by me, published in 2015. As editor I also coordinated a major collaborative work, published by Cambridge University Press in November 2013 in their 'Literature in Context' series. Marcel Proust in Context brings together thirty essays by the world's leading Proust scholars and is a significant point of reference in the field. Clive Scott, reviewing the book in the Journal of European Studies, described it as 'a wonderfully coherent, effervescent, tirelessly engaging volume.' A paperback editon was published in September 2016. See http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/literature/european-literature/marcel-proust-context

I am currently preparing a new edition of Le Grand Meaulnes for Oxford World's Classics and am general editor, with Brian Nelson (Monash) of a new complete translation of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, also for Oxford. The first volume, The Swann Way, will be published in autumn 2023.

Recent publications include articles on Proust and Valéry (on poetry, painting and colour and on their parallel writings of 1919); an 'Etat présent' on Proust in French Studies (open access https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/kny154); and, most recently, a piece on Beckett's Mal vu mal dit, available open access here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17409292.2022.2076410.

Research collaborations

Since September 2010 I have been a member of the Equipe Proust at the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes/ENS Paris (http://www.item.ens.fr/index.php?id=13857). I am also a member of the research group LEA! (Lire en Europe Aujourd’hui !): see http://www.ru.nl/lea/. With Anne Simon (CNRS, EHESS, Paris) and André Benhaïm (Princeton) I am part of the editorial team of the interdisciplinary Proust hub 'Pôle Proust', launched in March 2015 (http://poleproust.hypotheses.org/).

In June 2015 I was an invited chair at a doctoral conference at one of Exeter’s Erasmus partner institutions, Université Paris Est Créteil http://www.fabula.org/actualites/proust-et-le-roman-moderne-perspectives-comparatistes-colloque-upec_68467.php. I also chaired a round table closing the Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense conference ‘Traduire la sonorité dans l’œuvre proustienne/Translating Sounds in Proust’, where I animated a panel including Prof. Christopher Prendergast, FBA, Dr Ian Patterson (both Cambridge, respectively General Editor and contributor to the Penguin Proust), James Grieve (Australian National University) and Lydia Davis, writer and translator and winner of the 2013 Man International Booker Prize. See http://anglais.u-paris10.fr/spip.php?article2199. The event took place in the Hôtel de Lauzun on the Ile St Louis, the home of the Paris Institute for Advanced Study.

From 2016-2020 I was a member of the Executive Committee of the British Association for Modernist Studies (https://bams.ac.uk/). I sit on the Executive Committe of the Association of University Professors and Heads of French (http://www.auphf.ac.uk/), currently as honorary secretary. I am a member of the Society for French Studies and the British Comparative Literature Association. 

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Supervision

I am delighted to hear from individuals wishing to pursue postgraduate study in the following areas:

• the life and works of Marcel Proust (from a French or Comparative Literary perspective)
• topics relating to nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetry (in particular Mallarmé, Valéry, Leiris, Beckett, Bonnefoy)
• the novel in French, especially from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century
• literary modernism, especially comparative topics
• topics relating to translation and French literary writing from the late 19th century to the present

Research students

I have supervised a number of MA Translation dissertations at Exeter on twentieth-century topics (including Marguerite Yourcenar, Irène Némirovsky and Pierre Autin-Grenier). I have examined doctoral and MA-level work on Proust, Duras, Bonnefoy and on literary translation. I have supervised MA Global Literatures & Cultures work on Baudelaire, Woolf and Desjardins.

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Publications

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External impact and engagement

I have given invited public talks about Proust (including at Blackwell's Bookshop Oxford and Jewish Book Week, in London) and speak regularly about French literature and modern language study at schools and colleges. I have been interviewed for pieces published inThe Guardian concerning the year abroad and modern language study after Brexit.

Watch my 'ExeTalk' on research in Modern Languages, and my own research and teaching, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd_3zVYdfDw

Contribution to discipline

I am a member of the Society for French Studies (www.sfs.ac.uk) and the British Comparative Literature Association (https://bcla.org/) and sit on the executive committee of the Association of University Professors and Heads of French + (http://www.auphf.ac.uk/), currently as Honorary Secretary. I am a member of the Comité de lecture international for the online journal Acta Fabula (http://www.fabula.org/revue/index.php?acta/home). From July 2009 to June 2012 I was Conference Officer for the Society for French Studies. I was a member of the AHRC's Peer-review College (2014-2017) and am currently a member of the advisory board of the Australian Journal of French Studies (2018-) and the Editorial Board of French Studies (2024-).

Media

I review books for Bulletin d’informations proustiennes, French Studies, Modern Language Review, Journal of European Studies, Modern and Contemporary France, Notes and Queries, PN Review, TLS and a number of other journals. My work has been published in the Magazine littéraire and cited, for example, in the Nouvelle revue française and the London Review of Books.

I have been interviewed in The Guardian about the year abroad and the coronavirus pandemic; and I have provided scholarly advice for BBC Radio 4's 'Open Book' programme.

My lead essay on Proust's 150th anniversary for the TLS can be read here: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/marcel-proust-150-a-la-recherche-essay-adam-watt/ and there is an accompanying podcast too: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/prousts-way/

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Teaching

My teaching reflects my interests in the developments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century prose fiction as well as wider questions about the interconnections of language, literature and culture. I have offered a popular second-year option entitled ‘Paris je t'aime: Writing the City', which considers constructions of Paris via readings of writers ranging from Paul Valéry and Marguerite Duras, to Gertrude Stein, George Orwell, Hope Mirlees, James Baldwin, Eugène Dabit and Eric Hazan. I have also taught a final-year option on Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu and have taught critical theory and literary translation at MA level. I have contributed to the MA in Global Literatures and Cultures, which I helped establish.

Modules taught

• MLF1105 - An Introduction to French Thought
• MLF2001 - French Language, Written and Oral

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Biography

I was born and schooled in Edinburgh and studied for my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Oxford. I was awarded my BA in French and Spanish (First Class) in 2001. My doctorate, completed as a Senior Scholar at Christ Church and awarded in 2005, was supervised by the late Professor Malcolm Bowie. Prior to my appointment at Exeter I taught at Trinity College, Dublin (2005-2006) and Royal Holloway, University of London (2006-2012). I came to Exeter as Associate Professor in September 2012 and was promoted to a personal chair in December 2016. I was appointed Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2022.

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