Rate My Professor Alistair Rolls

Rolls' research specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature, with key interests in Boris Vian, fetishism, existentialism, French language, and crime fiction. He is the leading English-speaking expert on Boris Vian, having delivered a keynote address at the inaugural major academic conference on Vian at the Sorbonne in 2007 and being referenced in the bibliography of the first collected edition of Vian's works in 2010. Rolls has pioneered "Fetishism Criticism," a methodological approach examining co-existing contradictory narratives in literature. His extensive publication record includes monographs such as The Flight of the Angels: Intertextuality in Four Novels by Boris Vian (1999), Sartre's Nausea: Text, Context, Intertext (2006), French and American Noir: Dark Crossings (2009), Paris and the Fetish: Primal Crime Scenes (2014), Criminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Detective Fiction (2019), and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction (2022). He has also contributed chapters to volumes like Hexagonal Variations: Diversity, Plurality and Reinvention in Contemporary France (2011) and numerous peer-reviewed articles on topics including Agatha Christie's adaptations, intertextuality in detective fiction, and translation studies in crime genres. Through his work, Rolls has significantly influenced scholarship on French literature and global crime fiction.