Akane Kawakami

Akane Kawakami is Professor of French at Birkbeck, University of London. She grew up in Nairobi, Tokyo and Rome, then went to Oxford where she read for a BA Philosophy and Modern Languages, an MPhil in French and English, and a DPhil in French on the work of Patrick Modiano. She teaches and researches in the field of modern and contemporary French and Francophone literature, and is interested in travel narratives and exoticism, photography, contemporary fiction, and transcultural writing. Her publications include A Self-Conscious Art: Patrick Modiano’s Postmodern Fictions (Liverpool University Press, 2000), Travellers’ Visions: French Encounters with Japan, 1887-2004 (Liverpool University Press, 2005), Photobiography: Photographic Self-Writing in Proust, Guibert, Ernaux and Macé (Legenda, 2013) Patrick Modiano (Liverpool University Press, 2015), and Michaël Ferrier: Transnational Novelist. French without Borders (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023).