Professor Maria Scott

Maria Scott works on French-language literature and culture, mainly (though not exclusively) of the nineteenth century. Maria graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a BA in French and English (1995) and a PhD on French-language literature and theory (2000). In between, she spent a year studying and teaching at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. After her doctoral thesis, Maria worked at the Université Charles-de-Gaulle in Lille, University College Dublin, and the University of Galway. She joined the University of Exeter in 2013, where she works mainly on post-1800 French-language literature.

One of the things Maria is interested in is how literature interacts 'usefully' with our mental processes. Does it develop our empathy, including our 'mind-reading' skills, as some scholars argue? Or does it teach us to move between different subject perspectives, so that we don't get too entrenched in one way of seeing the world? She has been exploring these questions from the perspective of French-language literary studies, looking at what novels, poems, and literary theory have to say on the subject. Maria's most recent book, Empathy and the Strangeness of Fiction: Readings in French Realism, came out with Edinburgh University Press in April 2020. 

Maria's teaching and research tend to be in the area of 19th-century literature and culture, though she also teaches, and occasionally publishes, beyond the nineteenth century. Many of her publications have focused on the work of the novelist Stendhal and the poet Charles Baudelaire. As the titles of her monographs suggest, she likes to read works from unorthodox angles: Baudelaire's 'Le Spleen de Paris': Shifting Perspectives (Ashgate/ Routledge, 2005) and Stendhal's Less-Loved Heroines: Fiction, Freedom, and the Female (Legenda/ Routledge, 2013). The Baudelaire book won the Gapper Book Prize for the best monograph published in 2005 by a scholar working in the field of French studies and based in the UK or Ireland. The Stendhal book was published in French by Classiques Garnier in 2015, as Stendhal, la liberté et les héroïnes mal aimées.

Maria is currently the President of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, a member of the editorial committee of La Revue Stendhal, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Irish Journal of French Studies, having been its General Editor for four years.

In 2023 she became a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Authority.

In 2018 she was awarded the University of Exeter Student Guild award for Best Postgraduate Research Supervisor.