Jean Fornasiero first joined the staff in French Studies at the University of Adelaide as a tutor after completing her doctorate on philosopher Pierre-Simon Ballanche at the University of Grenoble in 1976. She subsequently obtained a lectureship at the University of New England in 1983, where she taught both on-campus and distance education students until 1991. She then returned to the University of Adelaide to take up a lectureship In French Studies. Successively Head of French Studies, Head of the Centre for European Studies and Head of the School of Humanities, she became Professor of French Studies in 2010. Her research interests lie principally in nineteenth-century French history, with a particular focus on the Napoleonic and Romantic periods. She has also written extensively on the historical connections between France and Australia, and on the history of French scientific voyaging in the Pacific. She was a member of “The Baudin Legacy” project team, which was funded by the Australian Research Council (2005-2009), and is the co-author, with John West-Sooby and Peter Monteath, of "Encountering Terra Australis. The Australian Voyages of Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders" (2004, republished in 2010). This book was awarded the Frank Broeze Memorial Maritime History Book Prize in 2005. In 2014, she published, with John West-Sooby, "French Designs on Colonial New South Wales " (Friends of the State Library of South Australia), which was a warded a Bronze Medal in the American Independent Publishers Book Awards in 2015. She is currently a chief investigator in an ARC funded project, “Revolutionary Voyaging”, which examines the connections between the state-sponsored scientific voyages of the French revolutionary period and the political and scientific milieu of the time in France. She also maintains a research interest in the history of intellectual commitment in nineteenth and twentieth century fiction and in developments in Australian languages policy and language teaching. She was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2012.