poetics · aesthetics · politics
Hannes Opelz is Assistant Professor in the French Department at Trinity College Dublin, where he has taught since 2011 in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies.
He read English at University College London, took an MA in French & Comparative Literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III), completed a graduate diploma in International Relations at Johns Hopkins SAIS in Bologna, and holds an MPhil and a PhD in European Philosophy and Literature from St John's College, Cambridge.
At Trinity, he teaches across the undergraduate degree in French (literature, film, philosophy, politics, translation) and on the School’s postgraduate programmes in Comparative Literature, Literary Translation, and Identities and Cultures of Europe. He co-designed and established the last of these in 2019 and directed it until 2025. He supervises doctoral research and has provided award-winning mentorship to two Research Ireland postdoctoral fellows.
He has organised and co-organised international conferences in Oxford and Dublin, including a 2017 conference on Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. With Michael Cronin, he co-founded The French Seminar @ Trinity, an online research seminar in contemporary French thought whose speakers have included Catherine Malabou and Emanuele Coccia. He also convenes cross-disciplinary public events, recently collaborating with the Irish Museum of Modern Art and an astrobiologist from NASA Ames Research Center.