Henriette Korthals Altes

Henriette Korthals Altes is a specialist in 20th- and 21st-century French literature and thought, with extensive publications on questions of mourning in the works of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Pascal Quignard, and Pierre Michon. Her doctoral research has developed into several intersecting lines of enquiry. Situated at the crossroads of cultural, memory, and trauma studies, this work addresses themes of memory, the construction of history, and the relationship between fiction and history. Her research on subjectivity and mourning has led to an exploration of how national narratives are shaped by cultural mourning, particularly in relation to the Vichy period. Her current work on the migrant crisis engages with issues of hospitality, responsibility, and grievability, while recent research on the 2015 Paris attacks focuses on the representation of trauma, national narratives, and the potential roles of transitional and restorative justice.

She is a research fellow at the Maison Française d’Oxford, where she has convened numerous conferences on French literature and its interdisciplinary intersections, alongside outreach events featuring French authors. Notable contributions include co-organising a discussion with Delphine de Vigan (Blackwell’s, April 2017), leading a round-table on Brexit, community, and literature (MFO, June 2022), and serving on the scientific committees of conferences such as Utopia and Migration: Renewing the Imagination of Borders in the 21st Century (MFO, April 2021) and Bodies on the Edge: Life and Death in Migration (MFO, April 2022).

More recently, she has convened two conferences on the work of Michel Serres. The first, Michel Serres: Thinking Beyond Boundaries (MFO, June 2022), resulted in a special issue of Parrhesia under the same title. The second, Michel Serres and Bruno Latour in Conversation (May 2024), has been accepted for publication as a special issue of French Studies (forthcoming, April 2027).

Alongside her academic work, she contributes regularly to the mainstream press, with articles appearing in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Observer, The Literary Review, and The Economist.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

• Michel Serres: Thinking Beyond Borders, ed. by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Henriette Korthals Altes Parrhesia, Volume 40 (December 2024)
• 'V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Emmanuel Carrère review – a humane and thoughtful testimony of terror and loss', The Observer, (3 November 2024)
• “‘Of a functional value of the idea of God’: Michel Serres, religion and the beauty of mathematics” in in Parrhesia, Volume 40 (December 2024)
• 'Resilience, Resistance: the collective mourning of the 2015 November attacks in En Thérapie' in Saison: La Revue des Séries (Paris: Classiques-Garnier, September 2024)
• ‘Fiction as Legal Authority? Orwell, Snowden, and State Cyber-Surveillance’ in Can Fiction Change the World, ed. by Alison James, Françoise Lavocat and Kubo Akihiro (Oxford: Legenda, 2023), pp. 177-190
• ‘Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and the gift of tears: beyond mourning and melancholia’ in Variations on the Ethics of Mourning in Modern Literature in French (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021) ed. by Carole Bourne-Taylor and Sara-Louise Cooper, with an introduction by Dominique Rabaté, pp. 129-15
• ‘When dance meets texts: Pascal Quignard’s Medea’, Revue Le Sans Visage 2 (2021) Saint-Louis University Press, ed. by Jean-Louis Pautrot 
• ‘Jouir fantasmatiquement de mon corps unifié’: Music, Writing and Affect in Barthes’s L’Obvie et l’obtus' Barthes Studies, Vol. 3, Nov. 2017