Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages
Research
Dr Sophie Marnette
Sub-faculty/Language: French
Sophie Marnette's research offers a linguistic and philological approach of literary issues such as the origins and evolution of medieval literary genres, the expression of narrative voice and point of view, the relationship between history and fiction, etc. Her first book Narrateur et points de vue dans la littérature française médiévale : Une approche linguistique (Peter Lang, 1998) focuses on storytelling in the French Middle Ages and her second book Speech and Thought in French: Concepts and Strategies (John Benjamins, 2005) studies reported discourse in medieval literary texts as well as in contemporary oral narratives, press and literature. Her current research project is entitled Quoting Her: Female Expression in Medieval French Narratives and funded through a British Academy research grant.It proposes a fresh interdisciplinary approach (i.e. linguistic, narratological and literary) that takes reported discourse as a meaningful criterion, based on textual evidences, to examine how female characters' discourse is framed and how it is expressed in medieval French narratives. Using a corpus of lais, fabliaux and nouvelles ranging from the 12th to the 15th c., the analysis aims to assess whether female expression differs between these three literary genres and whether it is related to the specific ideologies that underlie each of them. Sophie Marnette is a founding and executive member of Ci-dit, an international research group on reported discourse. She is also a member of the interdisciplinary research network: 'Voices in Medieval French Narrative (12th C. to 15th C.)', funded by the British Academy.
Email: sophie.marnette@balliol.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/marnette
Homepage: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~fmml0059
Dr Helen J Swift
Sub-faculty/Language: French
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. A corpus of texts in whose literary and rhetorical structures she is particularly interested are literary defences of women written by men in the period after Christine de Pizan. Her next project is on imagination in medieval French literature. She participates in the MARGOT project, based at the University of Waterloo, Canada, in the SIEFAR project 'Discours sur l'égalité des femmes et des hommes', and in an AHRC-funded research network on Obscenity in Renaissance France. She co-runs a new research group on 'Voices in Medieval French Narrative' which is funded by a British Academy Small Grant: http://web.me.com/sophie.marnette/Site_2/Welcome.html.
Email: helen.swift@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/swift
Homepage: http://www.medieval.ox.ac.uk/
Dr Chimène Bateman
Sub-faculty/Language: French
Chimène Bateman's main research interests lie in medieval and sixteenth-century French literature; particularly in the areas of literature and gender; courtly and erotic literature; and the influence of the ancient Greek and Roman past. She is currently writing a book on the figure of the female addressee in medieval and sixteenth-century literature.
Email: chimene.bateman@new.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/bateman
Dr Thomas M Rainsford
Sub-faculty/Language: French
Tom Rainsford is a British Academy post-doctoral fellow (2012-2015) specializing in historical linguistics, and more specifically the interaction between prosodic and syntactic change in medieval French and medieval Occitan. His current research project will examine the role of prosodic change as a causal factor in the diverging development of these two varieties in the medieval period.
Email: thomas.rainsford@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/rainsford
Homepage: https://sites.google.com/site/rainsfordtm/home
Professor Nigel F Palmer
Sub-faculty/Language: German
Nigel Palmer's research interests are in Medieval German language and literature. He is engaged in a collaborative research project, together with a group of colleagues in Germany, Switzerland and the US, on the 'Literary topography of SW Germany in the later Middle Ages', which is an attempt to establish a literary history of this region on the basis of the manuscript sources and library history (Latin and German). The project concentrates on Baden-Württemberg, Switzerland and the Alsace. One area of particular interest is the manuscripts from the Cistercian abbeys and nunneries in the region. His principal research project for the moment is an edition and commentary on an illustrated prayer book, the 'Begerin-Gebetbuch' from Strasbourg (now in Berne). Other areas of special interest are blockbooks and their place in early printing history, the interface between Latin literature and German literature in the Middle Ages, and palaeography and codicology of the period 1100-1550. He is editor of Oxford German Studies (together with Jim Reed) and of Medium Aevum (together with Corinne Saunders and Sylvia Huot). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a corresponding fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen. In 2007 he was awarded the Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Email: nigel.palmer@seh.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/palmer
Homepage: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~npalmer/index.htm
Dr Almut M V Suerbaum
Sub-faculty/Language: German
AAlmut Suerbaum has worked on 12th- and 13th-century narrative literature, medieval women's writing, the relationship between Latin and the vernacular language, and the use of lyric forms, especially in religious writing. Current projects include a study of lyric and liturgical forms in the writings of Hadewijch, Mechthild and Dorothea of Montau, and on the use of dialogue in medieval narrative texts.
Email: almut.suerbaum@some.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/suerbaum
Professor Annette M Volfing
Sub-faculty/Language: German
Annette Volfing is a medievalist with particular interest in later medieval religious, mysical, philosophical or allegorical writing. She has written monographs on Heinrich von Mügeln, on medieval uses of the figure of John the Evangelist and on literacy and textuality in Albrecht's 'Jüngerer Titurel'. She has co-edited volumes of essays on medieval notions of inner space, on the concept of friendship in medieval culture and on the figure of Dorothea von Montau. She has written articles on the "classic" narrative texts by Heinrich von Veldeke, Wolfram von Eschenbach and Gottfried von Straßburg, and on orientalism in Middle High German literature, and on medieval German religious writing. She is currently working on a monograph on the relationship between mysticism and allegory, focussing on the 'Tochter Syon' allegory.
Email: annette.volfing@oriel.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/volfing
Dr Cyril W Edwards
Sub-faculty/Language: German
Cyril Edwards's research interests are in Medieval German Literature: Old High German, medieval German lyric, courtly romances; eroticism and the supernatural in medieval literature
Email: cyril.edwards@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/edwards
Dr Juan-Carlos Conde
Sub-faculty/Language: Spanish
Juan-Carlos Conde's main field of research is medieval Hispanic literature. He is the author of different publications on Pablo de Santa María, Poema de mio Cid, Celestina, Juan de Lucena's Diálogo de vita beata, medieval historiography, medieval translation, and other topics related to that period. Others of his fields of expertise, in which he has also published extensively, are the history of the Spanish language (especially lexical history), textual criticism, bibliography, history of the book, and manuscript studies.
Email: juan-carlos.conde@magd.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/conde
Dr Geraldine Hazbun
Sub-faculty/Language: Spanish
Geraldine Hazbun's main research interest is the literature of medieval Iberia, particularly epic poetry, mester de clerecía, ballads, and historiography. She also works on Golden-Age drama with a special interest in Juan de la Cueva and Lope de Vega. Her research focusses on collective identity formation and its cultural, political, and ideological tensions as represented in Spanish literary texts spanning the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. She is currently preparing a monograph on the representation of Islamic kingship in the Iberian historiographical and epic traditions.
Email: geraldine.hazbun@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/hazbun
Professor David Hook
Sub-faculty/Language: Spanish
Medieval Hispanic studies, with particular emphasis on literary and manuscript studies and the history of the book. Publications include articles on aspects of the texts and manuscripts of epic, balladry, chronicles, popular religious legends and other works, and the manuscript collector Sir Thomas Phillipps and his circle.
Email: david.hook@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/hook
Dr Emma Gatland
Sub-faculty/Language: Spanish
Emma Gatland is interested in the literature of medieval and Golden Age Iberia; and the representation of women in poetry and prose, particularly in hagiographic narrative.
Email: emma.gatland@some.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/gatland
Professor Martin L McLaughlin
Sub-faculty/Language: Italian
Martin McLaughlin researches in Italian Renaissance Literature; Renaissance Humanism; Renaissance Literary Theory; Renaissance Biography; Alberti; Petrarch; Poliziano; Tasso; Translation in the Renaissance; The Classical Legacy in Italian Literature; Contemporary Italian Fiction; Italo Calvino; Andrea De Carlo; Translation Studies.
Email: martin.mclaughlin@magd.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/mclaughlin
Dr Nicola Gardini
Sub-faculty/Language: Italian
Nicola Gardini researches in the Renaissance; Stylistics and poetics; poetry; autobiographical fiction; translation from Latin and Greek, and from English. He is currently working on a book exploring lacuna and omission in the construction of literary sense.
Email: nicola.gardini@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/gardini
Dr Manuele Gragnolati
Sub-faculty/Language: Italian
Manuele Gragnolati studied Classical Philology, Medieval Studies and Italian Literature in Pavia, Paris and New York. Before joining the Oxford faculty in 2003, he taught Italian and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. A significant part of his research focuses on Dante and medieval literature and culture, especially on the relationship between identity and corporeality in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century eschatological representations, on medieval understandings of physical pain and on concepts of desire in the Middle Ages. He collaborated with Teodolinda Barolini on an edition of Dante's Rime and published essays on medieval and modern authors from Bonvesin da la Riva and Guido Cavalcanti to Cesare Pavese and Elsa Morante. He is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Identità dantesche, which explores the intersections between language, textuality and subjectivity in Dante and authors such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elsa Morante, Primo Levi, and Giorgio Pressburger who have engaged with Dante in the late twentieth- and the early twenty-first centuries. He serves as Advisor to the Director at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry.
Email: manuele.gragnolati@some.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/gragnolati
Dr Catherine Mary MacRobert
Sub-faculty/Language: Russian
Starting from her doctoral dissertation on the history of Bulgarian syntax, Catherine MacRobert's research has focussed primarily on the delimitation and interaction of various Slavonic vernaculars and the medieval literary language, Church Slavonic. Her primary data are drawn from the various translations of the Psalter produced up to the fifteenth century, and her investigations touch on the origins of Old Church Slavonic, medieval translation technique, evidence for prosodic and morphosyntactic changes (e.g. in clitic use and word division), the principles and practice of textual criticism in application to Church Slavonic material, the palaeography of Cyrillic and Glagolitic manuscripts, and Church Slavonic hymnographical traditions.
Email: catherine.macrobert@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/macrobert
Homepage: http://www.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/macrobert
Dr Stephen Parkinson
Sub-faculty/Language: Portuguese
As the only specialist in Portuguese Linguistics in a British University, Stephen Parkinson has a research interest in the broad field of linguistic studies in European and Brazilian Portuguese, in particular phonetics and phonology, and in the historical development of Portuguese in the 13th and 14th centuries, using computerized corpora of non-literary texts. His main area of current research is Medieval Portuguese and Galician Literature, particularly the Galician-Portuguese lyric and the 13th-century collection of songs in praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Cantigas de Santa Maria. He has received grants from the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Modern Humanities Research Association, and the University of Oxford Research Development Fund for the creation of the Centre for the Study of the Cantigas de Santa Maria (http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mmlcsm) which has developed a web database on the sources and manuscript collections of the Cantigas, and is beginning the preparation of a new critical edition of the text. He has been General Editor of The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies since 1998, having compiled its annual critical bibliographies on Portuguese Linguistics since 1981. He was one of the editors of the groundbreaking Companion to Portuguese Literature, and is now creating a complementary web database for students of Portuguese Literature. He co-organises the Medieval Hispanic Text and Manuscript Seminar.
Email: stephen.parkinson@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/parkinson
Homepage: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~srp
Professor Marc Lauxtermann
Sub-faculty/Language: Greek
Marc Lauxtermann has just completed a lexicographic project and is currently working on the following topics: the biography of John Mauropous, poetic paratexts and marginalia, Byzantine laughter and its social/political implications, the language of the so-called Prochoprodromika, and the earliest grammars of Modern Greek.
Email: marc.lauxtermann@exeter.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/lauxtermann
Professor Thomas M O Charles-Edwards
Sub-faculty/Language: Celtic
Thomas Charles-Edwards works mainly on Irish and Welsh history up to the twelfth century and on medieval Irish and Welsh literature and law. His books include Bechbretha (with Fergus Kelly: an edition of an early Irish law-tract on bees), The Welsh Laws, Early Irish and Welsh Kinship, Early Christian Ireland, The Chronicle of Ireland. He is currently finishing vol. 1 of the Oxford History of Wales: Wales and the Britons, 350-1064. A principal aim of this book is to include the history of the language and the literature as major strands within a more general history.
Email: thomas.charles-edwards@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
Staffpage:
http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/charles-edwards