Rate My Professor Alistair Rolls

Alistair Rolls is Associate Professor of French Studies in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He earned his PhD and Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from the University of Nottingham, UK, with his doctoral research centered on the works of Boris Vian. Rolls joined the University of Newcastle in 2003 as a Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Science, progressing to Senior Lecturer in 2009 and Associate Professor. Beyond teaching, he holds leadership roles including President of the Australian Society for French Studies since 2013 and Member of the Editorial Board of The Australian Journal of French Studies from the same year. His commitment to student learning and supervision has been recognized with several awards: the Dean's Award for Supervision Excellence (team award with Dr Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan, 2015), Vice-Chancellor's Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning (2007), Carrick Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning (2007), and Vice-Chancellor's Award for Research Excellence for the Faculty of Education and Arts (2007).

Rolls' research specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature, with key interests in Boris Vian, fetishism, existentialism, French language, and crime fiction. He is the leading English-speaking expert on Boris Vian, having delivered a keynote address at the inaugural major academic conference on Vian at the Sorbonne in 2007 and being referenced in the bibliography of the first collected edition of Vian's works in 2010. Rolls has pioneered "Fetishism Criticism," a methodological approach examining co-existing contradictory narratives in literature. His extensive publication record includes monographs such as The Flight of the Angels: Intertextuality in Four Novels by Boris Vian (1999), Sartre's Nausea: Text, Context, Intertext (2006), French and American Noir: Dark Crossings (2009), Paris and the Fetish: Primal Crime Scenes (2014), Criminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Detective Fiction (2019), and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction (2022). He has also contributed chapters to volumes like Hexagonal Variations: Diversity, Plurality and Reinvention in Contemporary France (2011) and numerous peer-reviewed articles on topics including Agatha Christie's adaptations, intertextuality in detective fiction, and translation studies in crime genres. Through his work, Rolls has significantly influenced scholarship on French literature and global crime fiction.