Abstract
It is with great sadness that we must report the death of Professor Nicholas Hewitt, who has been the Editor of French Cultural Studies since 2005. He died on 1 March after a final battle with the cancer that he had lived with for the past five years. He began his academic career with undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Hull, after which he taught at the Universities of Southampton and then Warwick. He was appointed to the Chair of French at the University of Nottingham in 1989, a post he occupied until his retirement. He was a distinguished scholar in French literary studies, writing highly regarded books on Louis-Ferdinand Céline and on less well-known writers of the interwar and post-war periods. He increasingly focused on the wider cultural context and was a leading member of the small group that founded this journal in 1989, with a mission to embrace all facets of French cultural life since the later years of the nineteenth century. He wrote widely about the culture of urban environments, especially of Paris and Marseille. His book Montmartre: A Cultural History was published in 2017, and he had almost completed his book on Marseille in his last weeks. He had a remarkable capacity for making friends and bringing people together across the French- and English-speaking worlds. He helped many people with their work and their careers, particularly inspiring younger colleagues to raise their sights and develop their own insights. He developed French Cultural Studies as the focus of a vibrant academic community, and the journal will mark his scholarly achievement and legacy in a subsequent volume. His death leaves us very much the poorer and he will be greatly missed.