Bill Marshall studied for his first degree in French with Spanish at the former Westfield College, University of London, before going on to postgraduate study in Paris and Oxford. He taught at the University of Southampton before taking up a Chair in Modern French Studies at the University of Glasgow and, in 2008, a Chair in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Stirling.
Professor Marshall’s research interests lie on the interface of culture and politics in the French-speaking world since 1900, using theory to explore that relationship. His first book, Victor Serge The Uses of Dissent (Oxford: Berg, 1992), explored the novels and thought of a Franco-Russian anti-Stalinist revolutionary, who was born in Belgium and died in exile in Mexico. His second, Guy Hocquenghem (London: Pluto,1996/Durham: Duke UP, 1997), looked at one of the founders of the contemporary gay movement in France, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1988. The close engagement with the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who were very influential on Hocquenghem, was a great help to his next project, on Quebec National Cinema (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2000), where he tried not only to bring some very interesting films (popular comedies as well as works by Denys Arcand and Robert Lepage) to the greater attention of those working in French and Film Studies, but also to sort out what we mean by 'national cinema' and the tensions contained in the concept. These three book projects, while seemingly disparate, were all ways for him to work out ideas on the key political questions of class and revolution, gender and sexuality, and nationhood. He has also written widely on various aspects of French film and media, including a contribution to Manchester University Press' French Film Directors series on André Téchiné. His current work develops the theme of mobile, diasporic ‘Frenchness’ with particular relation to the Atlantic: he edited an encyclopedia, France and the Americas, which appeared with in 2005 (Oxford & Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio), and his The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History was published by Liverpool University Press in 2009.
