Patrick Armstrong

Fonctions

Professeur assistant en anglais, École Polytechnique

Biographical Information 

Originally from Suffolk, England, I am an Assistant Professor of English at Ecole Polytechnique. I’m the author of Microscopy, Magnification and Modernist Fiction: Micro-Modernism from Hardy to Beckett (Bloomsbury, 2025). I hold a PhD in English Literature from the University of Cambridge. During my PhD, I was a visiting fellow at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. 

My research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, modernism, and the intersections between science and literature. I’m the Book Review Editor for the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies and I’ve previously taught at the University of Cambridge, the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, and the University of Orléans. I’m an affiliated researcher with Le Pôle Proust. 

Research Interests

Nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first century literature, especially modernism; literature and science; environmental humanities; comparative literature; history of the novel; text and image. 

Authors of interest include: John Ashbery, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Gerald Murnane, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf. 

My next book project focuses on the anglophone afterlives of Marcel Proust’s work. 

Selected Publications

Books

Microscopy, Magnification and Modernist Fiction: Micro-Modernism from Hardy to Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 2025).

Articles and Book Chapters

‘D. H. Lawrence and Scale’, in Reading D. H. Lawrence in the Anthropocene, ed. Terry Gifford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025).

‘Going through the motions: natural science and movement in Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy’, Textual Practice, 36.11 (2022), 1932-1954.

‘Samuel Beckett and the Sinic World’, in Influencing Beckett / Beckett Influencing, ed. Anita Rakoczy, Mariko Hori Tanaka and Nicholas E. Johnson (Budapest and Paris: Károli Gáspár University and L’Harmattan, 2020), pp. 45-58.

‘Instrumental Optics: Microscopic and Telescopic Lenses in Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower’, Thomas Hardy Journal, 33 (Winter 2017), 85-99.

Book Reviews

‘Poetry, Painting, Physics’, a review of Rachel Fountain Eames, Physics and the Modernist Avant-Garde: Quantum Modernisms and Modernist Relativities (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), The Cambridge Quarterly, 54.1 (2025), 74-82. 

Review of David Shackleton, British Modernism and the Anthropocene: Experiments with Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 7.2 (2025). 

Review of Caroline Hovanec, Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and British Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), The British Society for Literature and Science.

Review of Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), The British Society for Literature and Science.

Review of Jonathan Potter, Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Seeing, Thinking, Writing (Palgrave, 2018), The British Society for Literature and Science.