Dr H.J. Swift
Helen J. Swift, M.A., D.Phil.
University Lecturer (CUF) in Medieval French, Fellow of St Hilda's College
Faculty and Sub-Faculty Schools Liaison Officer
Address: St Hilda's College, Oxford, OX4 1DY
Homepage: http://www.medieval.ox.ac.uk
Email: helen.swift@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk
Tel: 01865 276871
Research
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 recently co-ran a new research group on 'Voices in Medieval French Narrative', funded by a British Academy Small Grant: http://web.me.com/sophie.marnette/Voice/Welcome.html
Teaching
French language and medieval literature; Introduction to Film Studies; Critical theory; Palaeography.
Graduate Teaching
Helen is happy to supervise topics on later medieval literature, as well as interdisciplinary dissertations (e.g. French and Art History) undertaken as part of the MSt in Medieval Studies. She is currently supervising doctorates on the 'Roman de la rose'.
Publications
'Splitting Heirs: Wrestling with the Rose in the querelle des femmes', in Essays in Later Medieval French Literature: The Legacy of Janes H. M. Taylor, ed. Rebecca Dixon (Manchester: MUP, 2010), 3-19
'Haunting Text and Image: Having it Out with Misogynistic Authorities in the Late Medieval querelle des femmes ', in Haunting Presences: Ghosts in French Literature and Culture , ed. Kate Griffiths and David Evans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 29-42
'Tamainte consolation / me fist lymagination: A Poetics of Mourning and Imagination in Late Medieval dits', in The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Milner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 141-164
Gender, Writing, and Performance: Men Defending Women in Late Medieval France (1440-1538), Oxford Modern Languages Monographs (Oxford: OUP, 2008)
'Martin Le Franc et son livre qui se plaint: une petite énigme à la cour de Philippe le Bon', in Lécrit et le manuscrit à la fin du Moyen Age, ed. Tania Van Hemelryck and Céline Van Hoorebeeck (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 329-42
'The Ghost(s) of the Author(s) Past, Present and Future: A Literary Reflexive Perspective on Authorship in the Poems of Jean de Meun and Martin Le Franc', Medium Aevum, 73 (2004), 235-59
'(Un)covering Truth: Speaking "proprement" in Late Medieval French Poetry', Nottingham Medieval Studies, 48 (2004), 60-79
'Alain Chartier and the Death of Lyric Language', Acta Neophilologica, 35.1-2 (2002), 57-65