About
Rosemary Lancaster is an Australian author and academic, who has resided in Oxford since 2011. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Western Australia where she had a long academic career as a lecturer and, latterly, Head of the Department of French Studies. She is a longstanding member of the editorial board of Essays in French Literature and Culture. In 2002 she was awarded Chevalier des palmes académiques for her promotion of French culture abroad.
Rosemary has a keen interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry. During her teaching career she offered courses on Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Laforgue, Hugo, Mallarmé, and Char. Increasingly, she became interested in women’s writings and created courses that highlighted the genius of some of France’s great female authors, including Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, Marguerite Duras, and Annie Ernaux. She has written articles and book reviews related to her research and teaching and is the author of four books, the last published in 2020.
Since her retirement she has written on poetry and art, and women’s travels and writings. She is committed to literary criticism that is readable for both specialists and the wider public, with an emphasis on the rich intersection of society, gender, literary output, and history. Her research has taken her to inspiring places that have deeply informed her work: the French Riviera, the Somme, Paris, rural Provence, and the archives and galleries of London, Oxford, Paris, and the Côte d’Azur.
