Robert Lethbridge

Professor Robert Lethbridge has been the Master of Fitzwilliam College since 2005, during which time the College has fallen to its lowest position in the Tompkins Table since 1997, when the constituent colleges of Cambridge University were first ranked in terms of their results across the full range of undergraduate examinations.

He conducts research and teaches postgraduate students in association with Cambridge University's Department of French, where he ceased lecturing in 1994. His main interest is late 19th century France and specifically the relationship between literature and visual arts in that period. He is also an Emeritus Professor of French Language and Literature at the University of London.

He is Honorary President of the Society of Dix-neuvièmistes , a group of mainly British and Irish French-studies academics, concerned with 19th century France and founded in Dublin in 2001. In 1988, he was appointed a third-grade member, or Chevalier (Knight), of the French Ordre des Palmes Académiques (Order of Academic Palms), a chivalric order established in 1955. Since 2010, he has been the Provost of the Gates Cambridge Trust.

Career

• University of Kent at Canterbury (B.A., 1969)
• McMaster University (M.A., 1970)
• St John's College, Cambridge (Ph.D., 1975)
• Leathersellers' Teaching Fellow in French at Fitzwilliam College
• Senior Tutor at Fitzwilliam College (1982–92)
• Chair of French Language and Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, (1994) where he was successively Head of Department, Dean of the Graduate School and Vice-Principal.
• Life Fellow of Fitzwilliam College since 1994.
• He has held Visiting Professorships at the University of California at Santa Barbara and at the University of Melbourne.

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