Greg Kerr

Greg recently completed a thesis on the theme of urban utopia and prose by poets in the nineteenth century at Trinity College, Dublin and is currently Departmental Lecturer in Modern French Literature and Keble College Lecturer in French at the University of Oxford. His thesis draws on recent work in the study of poetry and nineteenth-century thought and in the fields of text/image and utopian studies. It links utopia, viewed both as a political discourse of modernity and as a prospective force with the potential to shape future identities, to a practice of poetic language which is variously manifest in prose writings by the Saint-Simonians and Théophile Gautier, and in the prose poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud.