John West-Sooby

John West-Sooby joined the staff in French Studies at the University of Adelaide in 1991, having previously held positions at La Trobe University and at the University of New England. He has a long-standing interest in the nineteenth-century French novel, with a particular focus on the Napoleonic period and the works of Stendhal. He has also worked on various aspects of the literary and historical connections between France and Australia, and most notably on the history of French scientific voyaging in the Pacific during the age of sail. He 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 Jean Fornasiero 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, he published, with Jean Fornasiero, 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. He currently leads an ARC funded project, “Revolutionary Voyaging”, whose aim is to examine the interactions between the state-sponsored scientific voyages undertaken during the period of the French Revolution and the rapidly changing political and scientific scene in France at that time. He also has an abiding interest in crime fiction and in translation studies.