College position(s)
Director of Studies, Fellow
Subject
Modern and Medieval Languages
Dr Claire E White
Brenda Stacey Official Fellow
Degrees, Awards and Prizes
BA, MPhil, PhD
Research themes
I specialise in nineteenth-century French literature and art, with a particular interest in class, labour politics, aesthetics, and intellectual history.
I am the author of Work and Leisure in Late Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). This book explores how writers and artists of the early Third Republic engaged critically with cultural, political and economic discourses on labour, leisure, and time at a key moment in the history of class struggle in France. I am also the co-editor of three publications: The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910: Authorial Work Ethics, with Marcus Waithe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); a special number of the leading journal on Zola and Naturalism, Les Cahiers naturalistes, with Nick White (‘Zola au pluriel’, no. 91, 2017); and a special number of the journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, Dix-Neuf, on the poet Jules Laforgue, with Sam Bootle (vol. 20, 2016). My work has been awarded the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Larry Schehr Memorial Award and the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes’ Publication Prize.
My latest book, Zola’s Dream: Idealism on Trial, appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2025. Spanning the period from Zola's epic Germinal (1885) to his fateful intervention in the Dreyfus Affair, the book explores how the 'quarrel' between idealists and naturalists shaped the ambitions of the novel at the end of the nineteenth century, when differences over literary aesthetics invariably spoke of far-reaching cultural and political struggles. My blog post for CUP gives a brief introduction.
I am currently working on two new projects. The first, as editor, of a book for Cambridge UP, George Sand in Context. The second is a monograph focusing on peasant and working-class writers from the turn of the twentieth century, including Émile Guillaumin and Charles-Louis Philippe.
From 2019 to 2023, I was Associate Editor of the North American journal, Nineteenth-Century French Studies.
Responsibilities
In the MML Faculty, I regularly convene the final-year undergraduate paper on nineteenth-century French culture (FR11). I lecture across all parts of Tripos (including for papers FR1, FR5 and FR11) on writers such as Balzac, Mme de Duras, George Sand, Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, and Zola, as well as on nineteenth-century painting. I also lecture on the final-year comparative paper, The Body (CS5).
In College, I supervise first-year Girton students for their ‘Introduction to French Literature, Film, and Thought’ paper (FR1); and I supervise students from Girton and other Colleges who work on nineteenth-century France. In Girton, I am Director of Studies for Part IB MML and HML.
Other
I joined the MMLL Faculty in 2017 as a University Lecturer and became an Official Fellow at Girton College that same year. Before that, I held a lectureship at King’s College London (2016-17), and a Research Fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge (2012-16), having completed my Ph.D. at Clare College, Cambridge. As an undergraduate, I read French and German at Emmanuel College (2003-07). I attended various state schools in Bedfordshire and was the first in my family to go to university.
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