Rate My Professor Bertrand Bourgeois

Associate Professor Bertrand Bourgeois is Head of the French Studies Program in the School of Languages and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Melbourne. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy and specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature and visual culture. His research examines the interrelations between prose poetry and the visual arts across these periods, including themes such as the house-museum, decadent art, and textual still lifes. Bourgeois investigates how modern and contemporary authors like Georges Perec, Michel Houellebecq, and Virginie Despentes rewrite or subvert nineteenth-century French literary traditions. He has published on key figures including J.-K. Huysmans, the Goncourt brothers, Gustave Flaubert, and Théophile Gautier. His current interdisciplinary project, "Prose Poetry and the Visual Arts," explores these connections in French literature and culture.

Bourgeois's major publications include the monograph Poétique de la maison-musée, 1847-1898: du réalisme balzacien à l'œuvre d'art décadente (2009), and Petits poèmes à voir: de la bambochade textuelle aux pochades en prose (1842-1948) (Éditions Hermann, 2020). Other significant works are "Le parti pris des choses textuelles: poème en prose et nature morte" in Romantisme (2022), "Échanges transdisciplinaires et légitimation générique: le poème en prose et les arts plastiques" in Transtext(e)s Transcultures (2017), "From book to e-book: A digital revolution in French cultural studies?" co-authored with Véronique Duché in French Cultural Studies (2014), "Quatre ans seulement et pourtant: la distante proximité des deux versions d’Un dilemme de Huysmans" in Australian Journal of French Studies (2016), and "La Maison d’un artiste et À rebours: du livre comme objet de collection à la maison-oeuvre d’art" in Voix Plurielles (2008). He coordinates subjects such as French language programs and Introduction to European Critical Theory at the University of Melbourne.