Dr Isabel Maloney

Isabel is a Research Fellow in French, elected in 2025, and is Director of Studies in French during Easter Term 2026.

Biography

I first came to Cambridge for my undergraduate degree in Modern and Medieval Languages and my MPhil in European, Latin American, and Comparative Literatures and Cultures. After this, I was awarded the Henry Fellowship for graduate study at Yale, where I did research into English, French, and Italian literature, as well as Art History, before returning to Cambridge for my PhD in French. I have also lived and worked in Italy and France, having studied at the Università degli Studi di Firenze, and taught in the English department at the École normale supérieure de Lyon. I previously worked at the British Library on a project related to manuscript and archival resources in the French language.

Teaching

I teach on all parts of the MMLL Tripos, including FR1: Introduction to French Literature, Film, and Thought; FRB2: Translation from French; FR5: Revolutions in Writing, 1700-1900; FR11: Desire and Power in 19th–Century French Culture. I also supervise dissertations on nineteenth–century French culture, and welcome inquiries from students wishing to work on related topics for Year Abroad Projects and optional dissertations.

Research

My research focuses on nineteenth–century French literature and visual culture. I am particularly interested in the novel, cultural history, feminism and sexuality, and popular forms. At Emmanuel I will be working on two book projects. The first is based on my PhD research into literary censorship in late nineteenth–century France. My thesis highlights controversial novels by authors such as Léon Cladel, Lucien Descaves, and Guy de Maupassant, whose uneasy reception called into question the new Republican government’s promise of freedom of expression. I read these works with particular attention to the form of fiction, and to how wider aesthetic trends inflected these writers and artists’ negotiations with cultural restrictions and prohibitions. What emerges from my analysis is a striking pattern of political subversion being expressed through matters of sexual politics, and I therefore read scandalous literature in dialogue with anxieties surrounding prostitution, obscenity, the declining birth–rate, and, especially, newly emerging reading publics among women and the working classes. I am also pursuing a book-length project on feminist fiction in the nineteenth century, arguing that the popular serialised novel was a privileged vehicle for feminist activism. I investigate the compromises popular, feminist writers make in order to fit their ideological messages into the normative framework of the ‘page–turner,’ and suggest that this compels them to negotiate with more conservative positions than would first appear.