Claire White

Claire White is an Associate Professor of French at the University of Cambridge, affiliated with the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics and Girton College. Her academic journey began at Emmanuel College, continued at Clare College for her PhD, and includes prior roles at King’s College London and Peterhouse.

• Education: BA in French and German (Emmanuel College, 2007), PhD (Clare College, Cambridge).

White specializes in 19th-century French literature and art, focusing on intersections of class struggle, labor politics, and intellectual history. Her research interrogates aesthetic and ideological tensions in authors like Zola and George Sand, particularly their engagement with idealism and socialist thought.

Her publications include the monograph Work and Leisure in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Visual Culture and co-edited volumes on labor ethics and Zola. She is currently completing Zola’s Dream: Idealism on Trial (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Her work has earned recognition through the SDN Publication Prize and the Larry Schehr Memorial Award.

• Supervision: PhD students Ellie Stefiuk (anarchism and the short story), Ellamae Lepper (hospitality and Salon cultures), Isabel Maloney (censorship under the Third Republic).