The Centre for Early Modern Studies is host to the largest, most vibrant early modern scholarly community in the world. Based in the Faculty of English but interdisciplinary in its range, the CEMS is built around the activities and interests of faculty members, researchers, and postgraduate students.
Researchers
Associate Professor of French, Fellow of St Catherine's College
I work in the field of eighteenth-century literature and thought, with a particular interest in the ways in which authors create a public image of themselves, both in their lifetime and after their death.
Michael Hawcroft’s research interest is seventeenth-century French drama, especially Molière and Racine.
Professor of French, University of Oxford; Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College
My research mostly focuses on early modern French literature and thought, especially from the early sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. I am currently working on families that produced more than one writer or scholar. That is part of a broader long-term project on the relation of literature and learning to social hierarchy in early modern France.
I am Lead Fellow for Languages at the British Academy. This involves work on language policy within education and society.
Lecturer in Spanish at Christ Church, New, Pembroke and St Hilda's
The literature of the Spanish Golden Age (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and theatre in particular. Roy has recently completed a critical edition of San Nicolás de Tolentino, a saint’s play by the period’s most prolific dramatist, Lope de Vega. He is currently working on: seventeenth-century English translations of St Teresa’s spiritual autobiography, the Libro de la vida; Spanish literature depicting England’s Tudor monarchs; and innuendo in Lope de Vega’s religious drama.
Supernumerary Teaching Fellow in French, St John's College
I am a Supernumerary Teaching Fellow in French at St John’s College. My research is centred on sixteenth-century French literature, culture, and thought. My forthcoming book, The Direful Spectacle: Shipwreck in French Renaissance Writing, which is based on my doctoral thesis, examines the theme of shipwreck in the French Renaissance, reading fictional and allegorical shipwrecks alongside the eyewitness accounts of travel writers in order to explore the relationship between the material and the metaphorical.
My research centres on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and the ways in which it channels social, moral and economic preoccupations in early modern France. My first major project examined on how representation of avarice in late Renaissance France slowly evolved from past traditions to inform wider debates on gender, enrichment and status. Currently I am writing a monograph that traces the moral, social, and legal framing of villains, with the provisional title of Villainy in Literature and Law (1450-1610): French and English Perspectives. My upcoming future research will investigate more broadly the role of literary thinking as a life skill in early modern professional contexts.
Associate Professor of Medieval French, Fellow of St Hilda's College
Helen Swift’s research interests straddle the late medieval and early modern periods, looking at the poetics of vernacular literature between 1330 and 1550. Her work is interdisciplinary, in that it often involves visual studies of text-image relationships, as well as studying the history of the book in this period of transition between manuscript and print cultures. She also integrates critical theory into her work as a tool for opening up new perspectives on earlier literature to modern readers. Her first book examined the literary and rhetorical structures of literary defences of women written by men in the period after Christine de Pizan. Her new book looks at questions of identity construction and narrative voice in late medieval France through the lens of literary epitaphs in response to the question: who am I when I am dead?
King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies andFellow of Exeter College
Jonathan Thacker’s main research interests are in the Spanish Golden Age. He has written on the prose and drama of Miguel de Cervantes and on various aspects of Golden-Age drama, including its metatheatrical elements, its translation and performance, and its ideological content. He is a member of the ARTELOPE project at the Univeristy of Valencia (and the ProLope group at the Autònoma in Barcelona. He is also an investigator on the AHRC-funded ‘Out of the Wings’ project which seeks to disseminate information about and encourage performance of Spanish theatre in English translation. He has acted as a consultant on productions of Golden Age theatre including at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He is Series Editor for Aris and Phillips Hispanic Classics, published by Oxbow Books.
Marie Curie Fellow
Paola Tomè’s research interests focused on fifteenth-century scholarly works and culture. She has worked on Giovanni Tortelli (1400 c.ca – 1466), the first librarian of the rising Vatican Library, on the translations from Greek into Latin printed in the Veneto region in the fifteenth century, and has also dealt with the grammatical traditions from Antiquity to the Renaissance.
