Richard Burton, 61, formerly Professor of French and Francophone Studies, died at the end of January. He had been undergoing treatment for leukaemia.
Richard came to Sussex in 1973 having completed his BA in modern languages at Oxford and a doctorate on the French philosopher and surrealist ethnographer Michel Leiris, who wrote on Africa and the Caribbean, especially Haiti.
This chimed with Richard’s own interest in the Francophone world, and he came to know both the French- and English-speaking Caribbean well, spending a year at the University of the West Indies.
At Sussex he joined AFRAS (the former School of African and Asian Studies), creating innovative programmes of study to enable generations of French-language majors to undertake their year abroad outside Europe, and helping to develop interdisciplinary courses on multicultural societies.
Having studied both the French- and English-speaking Caribbean he was well-placed to write authoritatively on the region, as in his much-admired Afro-Creole (1997).
He was also immersed in the study of French society and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries, completing two parts of an intended trilogy concerned with politics, violence and the Catholic religion.
He also published books on Baudelaire and Poulenc, and left an unfinished manuscript on Messiaen.
He was a man of many parts, maintaining a large allotment from which he kept himself supplied with vegetables (he was an enthusiastic cook of hearty dishes). While no sportsman (though he did turn out for the University eleven), he followed cricket keenly, and possessed a great knowledge of the game.
Richard moved to France on retiring early from Sussex. An obituary in his local paper described him as a “colourful character”, observing that while he was “at heart French” he retained his British sense of humour, naming his last dog ‘Frog’.
Professor Ralph Grillo