Michael Hawcroft is Associate Professor of French in the University, and Fellow and Tutor in French at Keble College, where he is also Director of Studies in Modern Languages. He is Chevalier dans l’ordre des Palmes académiques.
He teaches French language and French literature from the sixteenth century to the present day. He is keen to teach any students with an appetite for learning French and reading carefully, but especially encourages applications from candidates at schools and in regions less accustomed to sending students to Oxford. He also teaches postgraduate students working on seventeenth-century French theatre. He has written books on rhetoric in French literature and on two of France’s most famous dramatists, Molière and Racine. His current research is on stagecraft, and attempts to reconstruct what can be known of entrances and exits on the seventeenth-century stage and the significance of such moments for theatre audiences.