Course summary

Kent offers an excellent environment for postgraduate study in French literature, thought, culture, society and the visual arts from the 18th century to the present. This programme is also available with a Year in Paris. Over the duration of the PhD, you produce an original piece of research of up to 100,000 words, in English or in French. Previous doctoral theses have included ‘Deleuze and Anti-Humanism: The Sense of Deleuze's Spinozism’, ‘Haptic Experience in the Writings of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Michel Serres’, ‘Photobiographies: pour une écriture de notation de la vie (Roland Barthes, Denis Roche, Annie Ernaux)’, and ‘De l'abject et du sublime: Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett’. The University of Kent is an ideal location to study French. Canterbury is the closest British university city to mainland Europe, and our proximity to the Channel ports and Ashford International station means you can be in Paris in just a couple of hours. Our Paris School of Arts and Culture is located at Reid Hall in a historic corner of Montparnasse, where authors and philosophers such as Barthes, Beauvoir and Derrida have lectured, and provides an ideal location from which to explore the city.