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Ms Cécile Varry

Cécile studied English Literature and Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon and passed the agrégation in English in 2014.

She is currently completing her PhD in English Literature at Université de Paris, where she also spent three years teaching undergraduate courses in English-language poetry. She was Lectrice in French at Christ Church, Lincoln and Brasenose in 2014-15 and Stipendiary Lecturer in French at St Hilda’s between 2015-16.

Research Interests

Cécile’s research focuses on the physicality of emotions in the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Her doctoral thesis, ‘T. S. Eliot and the Anxious Body,’ explores Eliot’s use of images of bodily anxiety, including contracting muscles, shortness of breath, clutching and clinging, and more generally the interplay between tension and relief. She is currently writing about the role of breathlessness in Eliot’s poetic imagination.

Cécile was previously a postgraduate representative for the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS) and co-editor of the Modernist Review. She won the 2019 T.S. Eliot Studies Annual Prize and the 2021 Fathman Young Scholar Award from the International T.S. Eliot Society. She also manages the International T.S. Eliot Society’s Twitter account.

Selected Publications

‘Looking for Relief in T. S. Eliot’s French Poems.’ The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual (forthcoming)

‘‘“What is that noise?”/ The wind under the door.’ The Waste Land, Repetition, and Feminist Pedagogy’, Modernism/Modernity Print + (2020), https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/varry-waste-land-repetition

‘Opening the Archive: T. S. Eliot’s Letters to Emily Hale. An Interview with Lyndall Gordon’, The Modernist Review (2019), https://modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/opening-the-archive-t-s-eliots-long-awaited-letters-to-emily-hale-an-interview-with-lyndall-gordon/

‘Review: ‘T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination by Jewel Spears Brooker’, The Modernist Review (2019), https://modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2019/05/31/eliots-dialectical-imagination/