I am a freelance academic translator (French to English) and editor. My clients are mostly academic researchers in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, but also sometimes think tanks, businesses, and non-academic writers. I have helped authors to publish a large number of articles and books in English, as well as translating reports, research proposals, materials for job or funding applications, subtitles, etc.
My published translations include texts by writers such as Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Luc Nancy (in collaboration with Cadenza Academic Translations), and Bruno Latour. In January 2020 I co-founded Rue Serpente Academic Translation with my colleague Dr Jon Templeman, which sometimes allows us to handle larger projects with greater flexibility or speed.
I was formerly a university researcher and teacher in French literature at the university of Oxford, and also taught English at the Université Paris Nanterre. I completed a doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2014 and was a Junior Research Fellow (postdoctoral researcher) at Christ Church, Oxford, from 2014 to 2018. My research focuses on autobiographical writing, and especially diaries, in French in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I also have a wide experience of teaching French literature, literary theory, and translation at university level.
My monograph Diaries Real and Fictional in Twentieth-Century French Writing was published in 2018 by Oxford University Press. This work explores varied forms and practices of diary writing through the work of André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Queneau, Roland Barthes, and Annie Ernaux. More recently, I co-edited a special issue of Nottingham French Studies on ‘Diaristic Writing and the Idea of Literature in French and Francophone Writing, 1940–2020’, published in 2022. I have also published a large number of articles and reviews.
This website contains a list of my previous translations (a small selection out of over a hundred completed projects), a complete list of my own academic publications, details of my teaching experience, some blog posts, and the text of four lectures on André Gide, which I originally delivered at the Oxford University Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages.
Dr Sam Ferguson: Academic Translator and Researcher in French literature 