Akane Kawakami

Overview

Biography

Professor Akane Kawakami arrived at Birkbeck in 2006, having held lectureships previously at the Universities of Cambridge and Warwick. She teaches and researches in the field of twentieth–century and contemporary French and Francophone literature. Her interests include travel narratives and exoticism, photography and the photographic, contemporary fiction, and interactions between literary and visual culture.

Qualifications

• BA Hons Philosophy and Modern Languages (French), University of Oxford, 1991
• MPhil English and French, University of Oxford, 1993
• DPhil French Literature, University of Oxford, 1996
• Senior Fellow, Advance HE (formerly HEA), 2017

Professional activities

Prof Kawakami is a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of University Professors and Heads of French (AUPHF+).

Research

Research interests

• Contemporary French fiction
• Travel Narratives and Exoticism
• Photography and the photographic
• Transnational narratives

Research overview

Professor Kawakami has published extensively in the field of modern and contemporary culture, with numerous articles in refereed journals on a wide range of 20th-century writers (see list of publications) and three monographs: A Self-Conscious Art: Patrick Modiano's Postmodern Fictions (Liverpool University Press, 2000), Travellers' Visions: French Literary Encounters with Japan, 1881-2004 (Liverpool University Press, 2005), and Photobiography: Photographic Self-Writing in Proust, Guibert, Ernaux and Macé, which discusses the interactions between autobiography and photography (Oxford: Legenda, 2013). A revised edition of her Modiano book was published in 2015, an unusual honour for a monograph in the humanities. This edition contains a new introduction considering the novelist's work in the light of his recent Nobel Prize win and two new chapters discussing his most recent novels: Patrick Modiano (LUP, Dec. 2015: http://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/60675).

Professor Kawakami is currently working on a monograph on the contemporary French novelist Michael Ferrier.

Research Centres and Institutes

• member of steering group, Centre for Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions within Birkbeck:

4

I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students who wish to undertake research in any of my specialist areas: contemporary French fiction, travel narratives and exoticism, transnational narratives, and the relationship between literature and photography.

Current doctoral researchers

• MICHAEL THOMPSON

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Sep 2019 onwards

  Title of thesis:

  Beyond the silence: the French Catholic novel in the late twentieth century. An analysis of works by Françoise Mallet-Joris, Christiane Singer and Sylvie Germain.

Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

• DALILA VILLELLA

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2017

  Title of thesis:

  Rhizomatic Poetry. A form of political engagement against capitalist society in twenty-first-century France.

  Description:

  The main purpose of my project is to undertake a Deleuzo-Guattarian reading of the poetry of Jacques Sivan, Vannina Maestri and Jean-Michel Espitallier, in order to demonstrate how the concept of the ‘rhizome’ has affected their work. I argue that rhizomatic poetry is used by these three poets to criticise and undermine capitalist ideology.

  The rhizome – a sprawling plant stem – is used as a model of thought by Deleuze and Guattari in opposition to the hierarchical, tree-like structure at the basis of capitalist thinking. Deleuze and Guattari consider that hierarchical or arborescent thought is a source of oppression in capitalist societies and they criticise the unimaginative way of life that derives from it. As poststructuralists and deconstructionists, they believe that the way rhizomes evolve – unstructured, horizontal and chaotic – can be replicated in thought to deconstruct or undo the capitalist model. In that sense, it is an effective tool to transform society and free human existence from the capitalist regime. The idea of rhizomatic thought has been influencing the way 21st-century French poetry politically engages in the fight against capitalism, and this is what I explore in my thesis.

   

  Awarded:

  2023

• TISH DASTAGIR

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Apr 2018

  Title of thesis:

  Representations of South Asians in Japanese Animation

  Awarded:

  2023

Publications

Business and community

Media

I am happy to receive enquiries from the media on the following topics:

• Patrick Modiano
• contemporary French fiction
• Franco-Japanese cultural relations