Telephone: 020-7911-5000 ext. 2321
Postal: School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages
University of Westminster
309 Regent Street
London W1B 2UW
Email: kellyd@wmin.ac.uk

Debra Kelly was educated at Queen Mary, University of London (BA Hons European Studies), and Birkbeck College, University of London (MA, PhD French Studies). She has taught at the University of Westminster since 1992, and became Professor of French and Francophone Literary and Cultural Studies in 2003.

Her research interests cover three inter-related areas: Text and Image Studies (with a focus on the twentieth century avant-garde), French and Francophone Literary and Cultural Studies (including Franco-British cultural relations in the twentieth century), and War and Culture Studies. She is the Director of the Group for War and Culture Studies (GWACS), an international research group of scholars, and is an editor of the Journal of War and Culture Studies (published by Intellect). She is co-editor with Valerie Holman of France at War in the Twentieth Century. Propaganda, Myth and Metaphor (Berg, 2000) and editor of Remembering and Representing the Experience of War in Twentieth Century France (Mellen, 2000).

In the field of French and Francophone literature and cultural, her major publications are Pierre Albert-Birot. A Poetics in Movement, A Poetics of Movement (Associated University Presses, 1997) and Autobiography and Independence. Selfhood and Creativity in North African Postcolonial Writing in French (Liverpool University Press, 2005). She has published articles and book chapters on writers such as Pierre Albert-Birot, Robert Pinget, Philippe Soupault, Jean Tardieu, Guillaume Apollinaire, Albert Memmi, Assia Djebar and Abdelkébir Khatibi, and recently contributed to the Cambridge Companion to Camus.

In the Department of Modern Languages she teaches on the ‘Introduction to Modern French Culture and Society’ and ‘Modernity and the City: Revolution, Spectacle, Representation in Art and Literature, Paris Capital of the Arts’ at undergraduate level, and at postgraduate level she teaches Research Methods and North African Autobiography for the MA in French and Francophone Studies. In the Department of Social and Political Studies she teaches the Cultural History of the Two World Wars, with a focus on the French experience.

She is currently supervising the doctoral research of three students working in the fields of French and Francophone literature. She has a special interest in doctoral studies and she is Deputy Director of Research in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages (SSHL, and Chair of SSHL Research Degrees Committee. At University level she is Deputy Chair of Research Degrees and Chair of Research Students Committee.

She is Secretary to the Association of University Professors and Heads of French, a member of the Steering Group of ‘Culture FB’, a research network of scholars working on the cultural relationship between Britain and France since the end of the 19^th century, and of the Modern French History Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research.

Her current research projects include work on the place of biography in Franco-British cultural relations, and on the relationship between the private self and public history in twentieth-century European culture.

She is also a Westfocus Knowledge Exchange Fellow and is leading two knowledge exchange projects in the Department of Modern Languages, the first on museums and galleries and the international visitor experience; the second on ‘Languages and International Events’ (HEFCE-funded) which will lead to a report on the HE language sector’s contribution to high-profile public events such as the Olympics.