Dr Holly Langstaff

Holly teaches literature from all periods for French Prelims papers III and IV, French literature from the modern period for FHS papers VIII, XI (Beckett, Djebar, Duras) and XIV, and translation at all levels at New College, St Anne’s and St Edmund Hall.

Holly’s current research project reframes thematically French literature of the last 150 years according to new paradigms and new centres of interest based around working-class experiences and working-class expression. She is interested in writers and experiences that have traditionally been overlooked or quickly forgotten. Holly has been awarded a British Academy Small Grant to run a workshop as part of the first stage of this project.

Her first monograph Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023. This book reappraises the influential French thinker Maurice Blanchot’s writing from the 1940s to his late work in the 1980s, demonstrating how Blanchot’s exploration of the question of technology remains decisive throughout his career. It situates Blanchot’s fictional and critical work in the context of his thinking of art as techne – the Greek root of ‘technology’ meaning both craft and art – as it develops out of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy.

The book was one of four titles shortlisted in 2025 for the R. Gapper Prize run by the Society for French Studies.

Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) – available fully open access

‘Uncontrollable Mechanisms: Maurice Blanchot’s Inorganic Writing’, French Studies, 73.3 (July 2019), 401-15 https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.1093/fs/knz130

Review of A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943 by Maurice Blanchot, trans. by Michael Holland, Modern and Contemporary France, 26: 1 (2018), 103-04

Translation

Holly project manages the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and is the co-director, with Ros Schwartz, of Bristol Translates Summer School.

At the Queen’s College Translation Exchange, Holly worked with colleagues to establish the Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators. She designed resources for French and German, developed resource templates for all languages and oversaw the running of the prize from its first year in 2020/21 to 2024. In 2024, over 16,000 students participated in the competition.

Holly is a regular tutor at the Oxford UNIQ Summer School. At St Edmund Hall, she is involved in several outreach initiatives, including the Language Miracles workshops, the Big Think Competition, and the Unlock Oxford panels.

For several years she worked with schools in the West Midlands on widening participation initiatives as WP Lead for the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick. Holly is interested in understanding the barriers preventing students from all backgrounds enjoying, and choosing to study, languages.