Dr Pascal Mercier
Reader in Contemporary Literature
It is with profound sadness that we report the death of Pascal Mercier, a colleague of ours for many years, which occurred on 16 September 2011.
Biography
Pascal Mercier was born and grew up in Paris. He studied French Literature at the University Paris III (Sorbonne-Nouvelle) and was awarded a PhD in 1991. Following on from his studies he published a substantial volume of the correspondence of André Gide. He then taught French Literature at the University of Kyushu (Japan) as a Visiting Professor. He came to Sheffield as a British Academy Institutional Research Fellow to work with Professor David Walker on the Gide Editions Project hosted by the Humanities Research Institute at Sheffield. On completion of his work on this project he became a Lecturer in the Department of French. January 2008 he received a Readership in Contemporary Literature.
Research
Pascal´s main research interests focused on the work of André Gide and the works of the writers known as «Le groupe de La Nouvelle Revue Française». André Gide (1869-1951), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947, produced novels that probe the nature of the human personality, the interaction between psychology and ethics in human behaviour, and the problems that stem from what he called 'the rivalry between the real world and the representations we make of it'.
Pascal was a lively presence in our departmental community and we miss him dearly. He was a first class researcher and intellectual and an inspiring teacher. The world of French Studies is the poorer for his absence.