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 musical representations of cultural diversity, including race, in French variétés (mainstream pop) from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s. 

• 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 French popular music specialist, with research interests in song production and audience reception, gender and body performance, national identity and race/ethnicity, as well as taste, success, protest and nostalgia. My first monograph, Protest Music in France  (Ashgate, 2009) examined France's 'alternative' music culture in the period 1990-2009, focusing on the ways in which artists, producers and audiences shaped a 'non-mainstream' identity for themselves. Case-studies focused on the artists Zebda, Tetes Raides and Manu Chao, and the book won the 2011 IASPM prize for Best Anglophone Monograph (you can read the intro here).

Since then, I have become particularly interested in the meaning of 'mainstream' popular music in France, and the material and symbolic conditions that shape commercial success. My second monograph, Dalida. Mythe et mémoire (Marseille: Le Mot et le reste, 2020) focused on the career of best-selling female singer Dalida (1933-1987), an immensely popular star and gay icon, in France and in the Arab world. This book examined the many shifts in Dalida's performance and reception from 1956 onwards, with a focus on the commercial success of, and critical contempt for, her Mediterranean exoticism, Arabness, personal tragedy, gay-friendliness and ringardise. This book was featured in several high-profile French media outlets (France Inter, Europe 1, France 2, Le Monde... ) and was the subject of one-hour podcast for Afikra: 'Dalida's rise to international stardom'.  

Cautiously, from the self-reflexive perspective of white scholarship, I am currently developing a new research project on the representation of  racial diversity in mainstream French pop (variétés) from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. The intention is to re-centre artists from racial minority backgrounds in the success of mainstream pop in the French métropole. My first article is this direction focuses on the French-Guadeloupean singer-songwriter Henri Salvador, whose career straddled racial stereotyping and self-derision while building transnational solidarities that defied racial categorisation. The article is freely available here: 'Métis in the Mainstream' (Popular Music and Society, June 2024).

Beside these solo projects, I am the editor and co-editor of several collective 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, a special issue of Transposition on French pop and feminisation (2024/12), available Open Access here.