Research Interests
Ève Morisi’s research considers the interface of poetics, politics and ethics in French, Francophone, and comparative literature from the 19th to the 21st century. Her work in political humanities has analysed the ways in which literary representations of violence and resistance engage critically with the notion and practice of justice and with socio-political forms of oppression, State power, and lethal law at key historical junctures. Modern French poetry is another area of interest.
Her archival research and several of her books have focused on Albert Camus. She has also worked on Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, as well as contemporary metropolitan and Algerian Francophone writers. Her current research investigates the figuration of terrorism in French and Algerian Francophone fiction and non-fiction.
Her scholarship has resulted in support by or collaborations with Amnesty International, the Red Cross, the Memorial Site of the Camp des Milles, and the Centre Albert Camus-Cité du Livre. She has curated a number of exhibitions, co-ran the Oxford Modern French Research Seminar from 2017 to 2022, and is the founder of the “Contemporains” Series, which organises conversations with major contemporary French and Francophone writers at the Maison Française d’Oxford.
Main Publications
- Annie Ernaux: Writing, Politics. Special issue of French Cultural Studies (Feb. 2024)
- Capital Letters: Hugo, Baudelaire, Camus and the Death Penalty (Northwestern UP, 2020). This monograph uncovers a transhistorical dialogue about both modern French lethal justice and the ends and means of post-Revolutionary literature. Using poetic analysis and contemporary critiques of violence, it reveals that, despite their differences, Hugo, Baudelaire, and Camus converge in questioning France’s humanitarian redefinition of capital punishment dating from the late eighteenth century. Conversely, and simultaneously, capital justice leads all three writers to interrogate the functions, tools, and limits of their art beyond the limited paradigm of “littérature engagée.” Extract available here
- Death Sentences: Literature and State Killing (ed. with Birte Christ; Legenda, 2019). This edited volume in comparative literature is the first to assess the contribution of a wide range of major European and North-American literary works (by French Revolutionary playwrights, Hugo, Dostoevsky, Wilde, Kafka, Mailer, King and others) to the critique of capital punishment, through poetics, from the 18th to the 21st century.
- Camus et l’éthique (ed., Classiques Garnier, 2014)
- Albert Camus, le souci des autres (Classiques Garnier, 2013). This monograph argues that an ethics of care shapes the non-fiction and the lesser-known fiction in which Camus sought to grant increased visibility to a range of vulnerable or conflicted communities. It shows how the writer rejected both socio-economic oppression and political exclusion, and attempted to establish a minimal threshold of humanity through his words and action, all while considering the limits of this enterprise. Extract available here
- Albert Camus contre la peine de mort (Gallimard, 2011, pref. by abolitionist lawyer and former Minister of Justice Robert Badinter). This volume collects all of Camus’s writings on the death penalty. It includes previously-unpublished material and presents the writer’s defence of numerous men condemned to death during Franco’s dictatorship, WWII and the purges that marked the Libération in France, the Greek Civil War, the repression perpetrated in Eastern Europe under Stalinism, and the Algerian War of Independence.
Background and Access to Higher Education
Ève Morisi was educated at non-selective state schools in France. She completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at Université Paris VII-Denis Diderot, Columbia University, Princeton University and the Sorbonne. Before coming to Oxford, she taught at the University of St Andrews and at the University of California.
Having a keen interest in social diversity and widening access, she would be delighted to receive applications from outstanding students from a variety of schools, including non-selective state schools.
For more information on the study of French at Oxford at the undergraduate level, please see this webpage. Information about St Hugh’s College can be found here.
Postgraduate applicants will find relevant information about modern languages at Oxford here and French in particular here.
Teaching and Research Supervision
For Prelims, È. Morisi teaches the close reading of modern and contemporary short texts and narrative fiction (Papers III and IV). At FHS level, she teaches French and Francophone literature of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries on Paper VIII, some modern and contemporary “Prescribed Authors” on Paper XI, Special Subjects on Francophone literature and 20th-century French poetry, as well as advanced translation from English to French. She is also the creator and convenor of the final-year paper “Histories of violence (1789-present).” Her lectures, in French and English, cover 19th-, 20th– and 21st-century poetry and prose, including Charles Baudelaire, Albert Camus, Assia Djebar, Marie NDiaye and “Writing Killing” in the post-Revolutionary period.
At the postgraduate level, she teaches seminars on such topics as Algerian Francophone literature, Baudelaire, “Conscience and Consciousness in French and Francophone Literature” and “Losing Oneself: Narratives of Alienation” in the 20th and 21st centuries. She has supervised or is supervising doctoral work on the ethics and politics of violence in Camus (at the EHESS), on multidirectional memory and cross-border communities in contemporary French and German fiction, and on “troubled” récits de filiation in the 21st-century, as well as MSt and undergraduate theses on various intersections of 19th-to-21st-century French and Francophone literature and politics, and on modern poetry (e.g. Camus and the Résistance; Arendt’s and Camus’s critiques of violence; totalitarianism in Algerian dystopian fiction; 21st-c. French postmemory narratives and the Holocaust; literary worldmaking in Semprún and Delbo; transfuges de classe in 21st-c. French life-writing; patterns of repression and agency in testimonies about 17 October 1961; representing the Berbers in historiographies of Algeria; portraits of women in the Algerian War of Independence; figurations of childhood in M’Rabet, Sebbar, and Djebar; olfaction in 19th-c. French poetry, etc.).
She welcomes prospective postgraduate students who wish to work on topics that relate to her research areas: Camus and Baudelaire studies; poetics and politics; poetics and ethics; the crossroads of literatures in French and violence in its many guises (19th-21st c.); contemporary French and Algerian Francophone writers.
Other selected publications:
- “Nouvelles Fleurs du mal de Charles Baudelaire.” Le Parnasse contemporain. Recueil de vers nouveaux. Eds. Henri Scepi and Seth Whidden. Paris: Classiques Garnier, forthcoming in 2024.
- “Annie Ernaux: Politics lived and written.” French Cultural Studies, Feb. 2024.
- “2005. Assia Djebar, ‘Fillette arabe’ devenue académicienne.” Faire musée d’une histoire commune. Rapport de préfiguration de la nouvelle exposition permanente du Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration. Eds. Romain Bertrand et Patrick Boucheron. Paris: Le Seuil, 2019. 487-494.
- “Penser le terrorisme: le cas Albert Camus.” Fellows 57: Regards croisés sur la violence extrême. Réseau Français des Instituts d’Études Avancées. May 2019. Reprinted in The Conversation, June 2019.
- “Staging the Limit: Albert Camus’s Just Assassins and the Il/legitimacy of Terrorism.” Terrorism and Literature. Ed. Peter Herman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 263-282.
- “Baudelaire et Camus : penser la peine de mort.” La Revue des Lettres Modernes Série Albert Camus 23. Paris : Lettres Modernes Minard / Classiques Garnier, 2014: 263-81.
- “La Misère au quotidien. Camus et la Kabylie.” Camus au quotidien. Eds. André Benhaïm and Aymeric Glacet. Lille : Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2013. 101-119.
- “‘Poésie-boucherie.’ Baudelaire’s Aesthetics and Ethics of Execution.” Thinking Poetry: Philosophical Approaches to Nineteenth-Century French Poetry. Ed. Joseph Acquisto. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 75-95.
- “Camus hospitalier? Camus fraternel? Les Impossibilités de ‘L’Hôte’ dans le contexte colonial.” French Forum 32 (Winter 2007): 153-69.
- “‘À une dame créole’ de Charles Baudelaire : de l’ambiguïté colonialiste à l’ambiguïté plurielle.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 35 (Spring/Summer 2007): 547-57.
Selected Awards and Prizes
- The Robert B. Silvers/The New York Review of Books Grant for Work-In-Progress, 2019-2020
- European Institutes for Advanced Study (EURIAS) Fellowship, Institut d’Études Avancées de Paris, 2015-2016
- Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship, Institut Méditerranéen de Recherches Avancées (Aix-Marseille), Fall 2015-Winter 2016 (declined)
- Kirby Prize for best essay, South Central Modern Language Association, 2015
- Laureate of Peter Lang Young UK Scholars Competition in French Studies, 2011 (declined)
- Mary Isabel Sibley Fellowship. The Phi Beta Kappa Society, 2010-2011
- Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Fellowship, Princeton University. 2009-2010
- Laurance S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellowship of the Center for Human Values, Princeton University. 2009-2010
- Alfred Foulet Teaching Award for Language Instruction. Princeton University, 2007-2008
