My friend and colleague Christopher Johnson, who has died suddenly aged 58, was a brilliant thinker, writer and researcher across the disciplines of French, philosophy and anthropology.
In his first book, System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida (1993), he paid careful attention to the detail of the text (including the problems of translation) as well as the intellectual and social context of the writing. After a shorter book on Derrida in the Great Philosophers series (1999), typically sharp and clear, his third book made a major contribution in the field of anthropology: Claude Lévi-Strauss: the Formative Years (2003).
At the time of his death Chris had been working on a book about the prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan. He describes Leroi-Gourhan as a scientific humanist who sees the development of technology and technical intelligence as critical in the evolution of all human culture.
Born in Camberwell, south London, to Cecily (nee Burdon) and Beresford Johnson, a heating engineer, Chris was brought up in New Malden by his mother. He attended Beverley Boys’ secondary modern school (now Coombe Boys’) in Kingston, before gaining a first-class degree in French at King’s College London in 1981.
From 1982 to 1984 he taught English at the Université de Paris X Nanterre (now Université Paris Nanterre), while beginning work on his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, which was awarded in 1989. After a year as a teaching fellow at Southampton University, he returned to Cambridge to take up a junior research fellowship at Trinity (1988-92). He then secured a visiting fellowship at the Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine (1992).
From 1992 Chris was a lecturer in French at Keele University, becoming senior lecturer in 1996. Three years later he became professor of French at Nottingham University.
His impact on the school of cultures, languages and area studies at the university, where he twice acted as head of French and led the Science Technology Culture and Translating Thought research groups, deserves highlighting, as does his service for the Society for French Studies, and his devotion to the Modern Critical Theory Group and its journal Paragraph. He fought tirelessly to expand the discipline of French at Nottingham and will be remembered by his colleagues as a leader who had time to spare whenever it was needed.
He was loved not only for that analytical intelligence which made conversations with him on any topic endlessly interesting and enlightening, but also for his humour and generous heart.
He is survived by his partner, Ute Hirsekorn, a German lecturer whom he met in 1999, and his sisters, Pat and Linda.
