Dr Sam Ferguson | Academic Translator, Editor and Researcher

I work in two related but distinct areas: French-to-English academic translation and editing, and research on modern French literature.

As a freelance translator and editor, I work mainly with academic researchers in the arts, humanities and social sciences, while also accepting commissions from think tanks, businesses and non-academic writers. I have completed more than two hundred translation and editing projects, including books, journal articles, reports, research proposals, materials for funding and job applications, and film subtitles. My published translations include works by Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Luc Nancy (in collaboration with Cadenza Academic Translations) and Bruno Latour.

I completed a doctorate in French literature at the University of Oxford in 2014 and was a Junior Research Fellow (postdoctoral researcher) at Christ Church, Oxford, from 2014 to 2018. I have taught French literature, literary theory and translation at Oxford, as well as English language at the Université Paris Nanterre.

My research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century French life writing, particularly diaries and autofiction, and on questions of authorship and genre. My monograph, Diaries Real and Fictional in Twentieth-Century French Writing, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. In 2022, I co-edited a special issue of Nottingham French Studies entitled “Diaristic Writing and the Idea of Literature in French and Francophone Writing, 1940–2020”. My other publications include articles, chapters and reviews on writers including André Gide, Raymond Queneau, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Hervé Guibert, Christine Angot and Annie Ernaux. I also have substantial experience of peer reviewing submissions to academic journals.

This website contains a selected list of my translated works, a complete list of my research publications, occasional blog posts, details of my university teaching and four lectures on André Gide, originally delivered at Oxford’s Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages.