Professor Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze to deliver Wheeler Distinguished Annual Lecture at the University of Bristol

Wheeler Distinguished Annual Lectures (French Department)

4 March 2026 | 16:00–18:00 | Bristol

Professor Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze will deliver one of this year’s Wheeler Distinguished Annual Lectures, hosted in Bristol on Wednesday 4 March 2026. She joins Professor Patrick McGuinness (St Anne’s College, University of Oxford) for an event exploring research-informed creativity.

Professor Dousteyssier-Khoze’s lecture, “From Poisonous Mushrooms to the Archives of French-Nazi Collaboration: Writing Creatively as an Academic,” asks what it means to write fiction from within an academic context. How does research shape the work of a creative writer—and how might creative practice, in turn, reshape academic research? What counts as ‘research’ when writing creatively?

Drawing on her own practice across literary fiction and creative non-fiction, she reflects on a trajectory that spans her début novel, La logique de l’amanite (Grasset, 2015), published in English as The Beauty of the Death Cap (trans. Tina Kover, Snuggly Books, 2018), through to her current archive-based project on everyday collaboration in Nazi-occupied Paris.

Through these works, the lecture examines how archival research, historical inquiry and imaginative reconstruction intersect — and how creative writing within academia can both emerge from and challenge conventional research frameworks.

The Wheeler Lectures celebrate excellence in French and Francophone studies while fostering dialogue between scholarship and creative practice.

See also: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts-law-social-sciences/events/2026/march/sml-wheeler-lectures-french.html