Charles Forsdick - Biography#

Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool and Adjunct Professor in Translation Studies, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. From 2012 until 2021 he was AHRC Theme Leadership Fellow for 'Translating Cultures'. He has published widely on travel writing, colonial history, postcolonial literature, comics, penal culture and the afterlives of slavery. He is also a specialist on Haiti and the Haitian Revolution, and has written in particular about representations of Toussaint Louverture.

A Fellow of the British Academy and Member of the Academy of Europe, Charles Forsdick was President of the Society for French Studies, 2012-14, and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of International Slavery, 2010-13. He recently led an international project on '"Dark Tourism" in Comparative Perspective: Sites of Suffering, Sites of Memory' which included fieldwork in French Guiana, New Caledonia and Vietnam. Other current collaborative work includes a co-edited volume on transnational French studies, due to appear with Liverpool University Press. He is Co-Investigator on the AHRC/GCRF network+ Antislavery Knowledge Network. Professor Forsdick co-ordinated, with Paul Gilroy and George McKay, the Reggae Research Network, and was co-investigator on an AHRC-funded project -- conducted in collaboration with the Runnymede Trust, and supported by the Arts Council England -- called 'Common Cause Research: enriching the Arts and Humanities through collaborations between universities and BME community partners'.