Hannah Thompson

Hannah Jane Thompson (born 1973) is a British academic and professor of French and critical disability studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses primarily on 19th and 20th century French literature, especially the novel. Education Thompson attended Gosforth High School (1986-1991) and studied Modern and Medieval Languages at Newnham College, Cambridge before completing an MPhil and a PhD in nineteenth-century French literature at the University of Cambridge. She was Adrian Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge (2000-2003). Career Thompson has worked at Royal Holloway, University of London since 2003. She is interested in how markers of identity such as gender, sexuality and disability are represented in French realist and naturalist texts. Her first book Naturalism Redressed (2004) explores the relationship between costume and identity construction in the Rougon-Macquart novels by Emile Zola. Thompson argues that Zola's metaphors of clothing operate as a subversive network of references to fabric and flesh which undermines Zola's Naturalist project. According to Laurey Martin-Berg, "Thompson's 'use of clothing to illustrate how far Naturalism's chief spokesman strayed from his literary theories breaks new ground, and her well-documented and convincing analyses make an important contribution to the ongoing demystification of Zola as a "Naturalist" novelist as well as to a critical re-examination of the implications of Naturalism in and for the novel."