James S. Williams studied French at University College London and was awarded a PhD by Queen Mary, University of London. He taught first at Rutgers University, Princeton and Fordham University in the United States, then at University of Kent (Canterbury), before joining Royal Holloway in 2004 as Professor of Modern French Literature and Film. He is currently Director of the Centre for Visual Cultures.  

Prof Williams has published widely on French/Francophone and European film and literature. He is the author of The Erotics of Passage: Pleasure, Politics, and Form in the Later Work of Marguerite Duras (St Martin’s Press/Liverpool UP, 1997), Albert Camus’s La Peste: A Critical Guide (Grant and Cutler, 2000), The Cinema of Jean Cocteau (Manchester UP, 2006), Jean Cocteau (a ‘Critical Life’) (Reaktion, 2008), Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema (Manchester UP, 2013), and Encounters with Godard: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics (SUNY Press, 2016), and Ethics and Aesthetics of Contemporary African Cinema: The Politcs of Beauty (Bloomsbury, 2019). The latter won the 2020 R. Gapper Prize, awarded by the Society for French Studies (UK) for the best book in French Studies published in 2019. His most recent books are Frantz Fanon (Reaktion 'Critical Lives' series, 2023), and a  monograph on Ousmane Sembene's Xala (1974) for the BFI Film Classics series (2024).  

Prof Williams is also co-editor of Gay Signatures: Gay and Lesbian Theory, Fiction and Film, 1945-1995 (Berg, 1998), Revisioning Duras: Film, Race, Sex (Liverpool UP, 2000), The Cinema Alone: essays on the work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985-2000 (Amsterdam UP, 2000), Gender and French Cinema (Berg, 2001), FOR EVER GODARD (Black Dog Press, 2004), Jean-Luc Godard. Documents (2006) (catalogue of the Godard exhibition held in 2006 at the Centre Pompidou, Paris), May ’68: Rethinking France’s Last Revolution (Palgrave, 2011), and Queering The Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema (Routledge, 2020). In 2011 he recorded an audio commentary for a new DVD/Blu-ray edition of Cocteau's Orphée by Criterion. 

He is currently preparing for Bloomsbury a book entitled Archives of Resistance: Race, History and Violence in Contemporary Film and Television (forthcoming in 2026-27). He is also guest editing a special issue of Studies in World Cinema (March  2025) entitled 'Queer World Cinema', and co-editing (with Simone Giglotti) a collection entilted The Zone of Interest: Remapping Sound, Space, and the Archive in Holocaust Film (forthcoming with SUNY Press in 2027).

Prof Williams frequently collaborates with cultural institutions such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Tate Modern, the Institut Français and English National Opera in London. He is a contributor to The Guardian and his recent media work includes appearances on TRT (Turkish national television) and Radio 4 ('Last Word').

Prof Williams is currently Director of the Centre for Visual Cultures and Director of Research for the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. 

Affiliations

General Editor of French Screen Studies

Contributing Editor of Film Quarterly   

Member of the AHRC's Peer Review College

Member of the International Editorial Advisory Board of Reframe: Research in Media, Film and Music (Sussex)

Member of the Association of University Professors and Heads of French

Member of British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies

Member of The Society of Authors

Teaching 2023-24

 FR1400: French Language: Culture and Translation

 FR2106: Cinema in France: From Modernism to the Postmodern

 LA2000: Liberal Arts II: Power, Soceity and Cultural Practice

 ML1101:  International Film I

 ML2101: International Film II

 ML3207: Transnational Cinema

 ML3208/ML3214: Comparative Literature and Culture Dissertation

 Research Interests 

 French and European Cinema

 Francophone Cinema (in particular West and Central African)

 20/21C French Literature and Thought

 Ethics and Aesthetics

 Gender and Queer Theory

 Postcolonial Cultures

I would be pleased to hear from anyone interested in postgraduate research in these areas. Interdisciplinary and comparative approaches are especially welcome.