Professor Mary Orr

Professor Mary Orr

Modern Languages
University of Southampton
Highfield
Southampton
SO17 1BJ

Position: Professor of French

Location: 65/3057
Extension: 23408
Telephone: (023) 8059 3408
Fax: (023) 8059 3288
Email Professor Mary Orr

Biographical notes

Mary Orr began her career in Modern Languages by gaining an MA in French and German at St. Andrews, and a PhD in French at Cambridge (Queens’ College) on intertextuality in the works of Nobel Prize Winner for Literature, Claude Simon. She then held various temporary lectureship posts (at the University of Wales, Swansea, Christ Church, Oxford and Queens’ College Cambridge) before being appointed to a permanent lectureship at St Andrews. From there, she moved to a Readership at the University of Exeter, where she was promoted to a Personal Chair in Modern French Studies in 1999. Appointed Professor of French at Southampton in 2005, she brings considerable experience of French Studies in the UK through her research, teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, PhD student supervision and service on national committees, SCASS (The Standing Conference of the Arts and Social Sciences), and AUPHF (The Association of University Professors and Heads of French). Since joining the University of Southampton, Mary has been Director of Postgraduate Research for the School of Humanities (2007-9), Director of Research for the School of Modern Languages (2005-6, 2008-9) and Head of French (2006, 2010).

  • In January 2009, Mary was invited to join the Centre Flaubert, ITEM, Paris, as its UK member.
  • She has been a member of the AHRC Peer Review College since 2007.
  • After serving as General Editor (Promotion) Forum for Modern Language Studies for 11 years, Mary has just become its latest Editorial Consultant
  • From July 2009 Mary is Editor of French Studies Bulletin and a member of the Executive Committee of the Society of French Studies.

Mary also serves on the editorial boards of Dix-Neuf and e-France, and is a member of the Peer Review Committee of the Publications Series of the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies (IGRS). She is also a specialist reader for Academic Presses including OUP and Ashgate.

Teaching interests and innovations

Teaching interests

Mary Orr's undergraduate teaching focuses on the literature and culture of nineteenth - and twentieth-century France. She also convenes the Dissertation module, which takes up her particular interests in developing students' competence in comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to texts and cultural contexts.

Mary Orr is also the convenor of the two Research Skills modules on the MA in Transnational Studies, building on her extensive MA teaching and dissertation supervision experience.

Teaching innovations

Research on the France of Flaubert – his works, his cultural contexts - has been a constant source of inspiration for Mary’s publications and innovations in teaching.

She joined the Radio 4 'In our time' programme with Melvyn Bragg to discuss the Trial of Madame Bovary on 12th July 2007.

With the financial support of a University of Southampton LATEU Learning and Teaching Enhancement Fund Award in 2008, Mary has recently developed a visualisation tool with Dr Mark Weal in Electronic and Computer Science at Southampton for use in her ‘Flaubert’s France’ course, and her other nineteenth-century teaching. Students at Southampton taking Mary’s ‘Flaubert’s France’ course can now sample a Flaubert text that is never taught in the UK, la Tentation de saint Antoine. See the visualization tool

In 2009, Mary’s ‘Flaubert’s France’ students nominated her for a Vice-Chancellor’s Teaching Award

Research expertise

Mary's research interests in ‘intertextuality’ – its theories, debates, practices and contexts – are centred in French and European literary and cultural studies of the nineteenth century to the present. Her research has concentrated mainly on the novel and short fiction of the period, canonical exponents such as Flaubert and Claude Simon, metropolitan French contemporary women’s writing and, latterly, the fascinating intertextuality of early and mid-nineteenth-century French science and dissemination of scientific ideas in national and cross-Channel contexts through literary and artistic representations. Her three most recent monographs reflect the interdisciplinary nature of her work in French studies:

Flaubert’s Tentation: Remapping Nineteenth-Century French History of Religion and Science (Oxford: OUP, 2008), 368 pp. This book was completed thanks to the support of an AHRC Leave Scheme Award, February to May 2007.

AHRC

The AHRC also supported the completion of my previous monograph (2003), again thanks to a Leave Scheme Award, February to May 2001

 Book cover: Flaubert's Tentation
Intertextuality: debates and contexts (Cambridge: Polity, 2003). Book cover: Intertextuality: debates and contexts
Flaubert: Writing the Masculine (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 250 pp. Book cover: Flaubert: Writing the Masculine

Postgradute supervision

Mary warmly welcomes contacts from prospective PhD students wishing to discuss supervision of projects in any of my fields of research expertise: the modern French novel, intertextuality, women’s writing, gender studies, the interfaces of nineteenth-century science and the arts in French, cross-channel or European contexts.

Current postgraduate supervision

Mary is currently supervising PhDs on French women’s writing and reconfigurations of modern pilgrimage and is advisor to two PhDs on translingual, Jewish writers.

Recently completed postgraduate supervision

Mary has successfully supervised to completion 10 PhDs in Nineteenth-Century and Modern French Studies, Comparative Literature, French Feminism and French Women’s Writing and Transnational studies research areas (5 AHRC funded). Of these PhD students, several are now young academics in UK French Studies, English and Gender Studies and Modern Drama.

Current research projects

Since RAE2008 Mary's recent essay publications have centred on early nineteenth-century French and British women in science in a period when none were thought to exist. This work informs a larger project on pioneering women in early nineteenth-century science. She is currently preparing for publication a number of essays on literary-scientific topics which could not be included in her latest monograph -- on the impacts of the Cuvier salon, of scientists at the Musée d’histoire naturelle de Rouen and on geological poetry.

Selected Publications

Selected Forthcoming Publications

  • ‘Towards a feminist revisionism of an aesthetics of mastery: Harold Bloom, neo-Romanticism and the critical sublime’, in Writing, Reading and the Influence of Harold Bloom, edited by Alan Rawes and Jonathon Shears (Manchester: MUP, 2009).
  • ‘Education, Education, Education: the space of the Muséum as showcase for thinking its public’, in Institutions and Power, edited by Kate Griffiths and David Evans (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009).
  • ‘Intertextuality’ in the Encyclopaedia of Literary and Cultural Theory: Vol. II, Literary Theory from 1966 to the Present, ed. Robert Eaglestone, 2009.
  • ‘Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos and Flaubert’s Tentation de saint Antoine: crossing frontiers in literary science’ in Patterns of Knowledge: essays in honour of Martina Lauster eds. Ricarda Schmitt and Gert von Hoff (Münster: MV Wissenschaft, 2009)
  • ‘The metamorphoses of forms in Tournier’s Roi des Aulnes and Pierrette Fleutiaux’s Métamorphoses de la reine’ in Narratives of French Modernity: Themes, Forms and Metamorphosis. Essays in honour of David Gascoigne, edited by Lorna Milne and Mary Orr (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010)

Commissioned Essay Publications in press

  • ‘Botany en Famille: A visit to the Jardin des Plantes in 1857’
  • ‘Intertextuality: old debates in new contexts’
  • ‘Epitaphs on stones: Louis Bouilhet’s les Fossiles and the afterlife of memory’
  • ‘Flaubert’s La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier: cultural memory and the hidden lives of a source‘
Teaching responsibilities for Professor Mary Orr
Module title Module code Discipline Role
Dissertation LANG3003 Other unspecified languages Course leader
Faces of France FREN2017 French Studies Course leader
Flaubert's France FREN3024 French Studies Course leader
Research Skills 1 TRAN6001 Transnational Studies Course leader
Research Skills 2 TRAN6004 Transnational Studies Course leader
Modern French Culture FREN1001 French Studies Tutor

Publications from e–Prints Soton

Orr, Mary (2008) Flaubert's Tentation: remapping nineteenth-century French histories of religion and science, Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 352pp.
Orr, Mary (2007) Keeping it in the family: the extraordinary case of Cuvier's daughters. In, Burek, C.V. and Higgs, B. (eds.) The Role of Women in the History of Geology. London, UK, Geological Society of London, 277-286. (GSL Special Publications 281).
Orr, Mary (2007) La Tentation de saint Antoine [The Temptation of Saint Anthony] by Gustave Flaubert. The Literary Encyclopedia, 1-3.
Orr, Mary (2007) Pursuing proper protocol: Sarah Bowdich's purview of the sciences of exploration. Victorian Studies, 49, (2), 277-285. (doi:10.2979/VIC.2007.49.2.277)
Orr, Mary (2007) Kristeva and the trans-missions of the intertext: signs, mothers and speaking in tongues. In, Gillis, Stacy, Howie, Gillian and Munford, Rebecca (eds.) Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. Basingstoke, UK, Palgrave, 30-45.
Orr, Mary (2007) Women and daughters of genius: Mrs Barbara Hofland and Mlle Clémentine Cuvier. In, Dow, Gillian (ed.) Translators, Interpreters, Mediators: Women Writers 1700-1900. Oxford, UK, Peter Lang, 143-158. (European Connections, 25).
Orr, Mary and Sharpe, Lesley (eds.) (2005) From Goethe to Gide: feminism, aesthetics and the literary canon in France and Germany, 1770-1936, Exeter, University of Exeter Press
Orr, Mary (2005) Flaubert’s Cautionary Tales and the Art of the Absolute. In, Orr, Mary and Sharpe, Lesley (eds.) From Goethe to Gide: Feminism, Aesthetics and the French and German Literary Canon, 1770-1936. Exeter, UK, University of Exeter Press, 113-128.
Orr, Mary (2005) Postscript. In, Orr, Mary and Sharpe, Lesley (eds.) From Goethe to Gide: Feminism, Aesthetics and the French and German Literary Canon, 1770-1936. Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 199-204.
Orr, Mary (2005) Still life and moving death in Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale. Dix-Neuf: Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, 5, 16-27.
Orr, Mary (2004) Death and the post mortem in Flaubert’s Works. In, Unwin, Timothy (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Flaubert. Cambridge, UK, New York, US, Cambridge University Press, 105-121. (Cambridge Companions to Literature).
Orr, Mary (2003) Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 256pp.
Orr, Mary (2003) Provincial transfers and French cultures: Flaubert's voyage aux Pyrénées et en Corse. In, Harkness, Nigel, Rowe, Paul, Unwin, Tim and Yee, Jennifer (eds.) Visions/Revisions: Essays on Nineteenth-Century French Culture. Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, Peter Lang, 72-92. (French Studies of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 14).
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