I am a Senior Lecturer in French Cultural Studies, at the University of Manchester since 2002. My teaching specialism covers the history, politics and culture of modern and contemporary France, from the 19^th century to the present. My research is more narrowly focused on French popular music since the 1950s, with special interests in the representation  of cultural identities (ethnicity, race, gender, generation...) and their relative commercial success and critical prestige.

My two monographs, Protest Music in France (Ashgate 2009; re-ed Routledge 2016) and Dalida. Mythe et Mémoire (Le Mot et le reste, 2020), examine contemporary popular music in France from the distinct but complementary perspectives of ‘alternative’ and ‘mainstream’ cultures, with forays into audience research, music festivals, posthumous fame, elitism, and the representation of whiteness, exoticism and cosmopolitanism in metropolitan France. 

Cautiously, from the self-conscious and critical perspective of white scholarship, I am currently developing a project on representations of  racial diversity in French variétés (mainstream pop) in the period 1955-1987, i.e. before rap and when vinyl records and French state television defined popular taste. 

• PhD (The University of Southampton, 2003)
• PGCE (Homerton College, Cambridge, 1998)
• MA in French as Foreign Language (Université d'Aix-en-Provence, 1998)
• MA in English Studies (Université de Rouen, 1997)

PhD students:

I warmly welcome enquiries for postgraduate supervision in the broad areas of French and francophone popular culture, including popular music. Proposals with focuses on performance, 'identity', audience reception, multi-media (radio, television, film), cultural policy and/or music industry are particularly welcome.

In 2025 I received an 'Excellence Award' as Doctoral Supervisor from the UK Council of Graduate Education (UKCGE). 

My current PhD students are: 

Trang Nguyen (started 2023), with a French Studies project on the representation of women in Vietnamese and Francophone cinema. 

Isaac Milhofer (started 2023), with a Music projet on the work and career of singer Grace Jones. 

Brett Robinson (started 2021), with an Intercultural Communication project on the translation of opera. 

I am also involved in the supervision of many other students as independent panel reviewer. 

Past PhD students, all successfully (co-)supervised, are:

2019-22: Katherine Goodson-Walker (The myth of Cupid and Psyche in 17th century French court ballet)

2017-20: Adi Bharat (Representations of Jewish-Muslim relations in contemporary France)

2017-20: Marco Biasioli (Russian 'indi' rock music). 

2018-20: Amelie Mons (The Experience of the Real in Jan Fabre's and Romeo Castellucci's theatres)

2014-17: Rebecca Johnson (The Clash of Articulations: Intersectional Identity in post-9/11 Britain, Spain and France)

2014-17: Henry Jones (Amateur translations into French of 'British cities' narratives on Wikipedia)

2011-14: Luciana Kaross (The Translation of Morrissey's song lyrics into Brazilian Portuguese)

2003-07: Kate Roy (Cartographies of Identity: Co-ordinates of 'East' and 'West' in the works of Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Leïla Sebbar).

I am a historian of French popular music with research interests in song production and reception, and in the entanglement of cultural identities (gender, ethnicity, race, age...) with notions of success and prestige. My first monograph, Protest Music in France  (Ashgate, 2009) examined France's 'alternative' rock music culture of the 1990s and early 2000s, focusing on the sub-genres and professional networks of non-mainstream identities, including in festivals and the press. Case-studies included Zebda, Têtes Raides and Manu Chao. This book won the 2011 IASPM prize for Best Anglophone Monograph (you can read the intro here).

Since then, I have grown increasingly interested in the so-called 'mainstream' of French popular music, and the ways in which nationwide trends, commercial success and critical reception interconnect. My second monograph, Dalida. Mythe et mémoire (Marseille: Le Mot et le reste, 2020) explored the career of France's best-selling female singer Dalida (1933-1987), an artist who typified the 'mainstream' with her stylistic diversity that reconciled conventional divides - French and 'Arab', heteronormative and gay icon, ringarde and prestigious. This book was featured in high-profile French media (France Inter, Europe 1, France 2, Le Monde... ) and was the subject of a one-hour podcast for Afikra, the online media reshaping the meaning of the Arab world: 'Dalida's rise to international stardom'.  

Currently, I am developing a long-term project on the place and representation of racial diversity in French pop or variétés, from the self-critical perspective of white scholarship. This project is focused on the period 1955-1987, when vinyl production coincided with state TV broadcast, and before rap music emerged. French pop of this period is often assumed to be an exclusively white space, but this research is illuminating the range of its racial diversity, and the range of its racial representations, from the perpetuation of colonial stereotypes (including blackface) to opportunities for interracial collaborations and substantial careers for artists of colour. I explored this ambivalence in a recent piece on Henri Salvador, a French-Guadeloupean singer-songwriter who was a fixture on French TV in the 1960s (the article is freely available here: 'Métis in the Mainstream' (Popular Music and Society, June 2024). In 2025, I won a Small Research Grant funded by The Leverhulme Trust to explore the televised music archive of France's Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA), leading a collaborative team that will re-narrate this forgotten history, re-centre the work of pop singers of colour in the French métropole, and re-evalutate racially problematic music archives. The collaborators are: Prof. Sue Miller (Leeds Beckett, UK); Dr Edwin Hill (University of Southern California, US); Dr Emily Shuman (Radboud University, NL); Valérie-Ann Edmond-Mariette (Université des Antilles, FR); and Etienne Castel (Université Aix-Marseille, FR). 

Beside these projects, I am a long-standing member of the editorial board of Popular Music (including as its book reviews editor), of the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France (ASMCF) and of the Francophone branch of IASPM, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. I am also the editor and co-editor of several collective books or volumes, including: Chanson et Performance (L'Harmattan, 2012); with Catherine Strong:  Death and the Rock Star (Ashgate, 2015; Chapter 1 is available here: The Great Gig in the Sky); with Nanette de Jong: special issue 'Music and Magic' of Popular Music, 2019, 38/1; with Isabelle Marc, the special issue of Transposition on French pop and feminisation (2024/12), available Open Access here.