Launching Claire de Duras: Ourika, Édouard, and Olivier (Oxford University Press). 
 
Join us on Thursday 29 October 2026 for an evening with the scholar who rediscovered much of Claire de Duras’s work, and the translator and editor of the OUP edition that includes the first English translation of one of her major works: Olivier. 
 
The star of the evening is the French romancière Claire de Duras (1777–1828), now emerging as one of the great writers of French Romanticism. 
 
The evening will be divided into two parts. In the first, Marie-Bénédicte Diethelm and Pratima Prasad will talk about Duras’s career and the process that led to the publication of the definitive versions of Duras’s fictions in Œuvres romanesques and Mémoires de Sophie, Amélie et Pauline: Romans d’émigration. This will be illustrated with readings of passages in translation. 
 
In the second, Pratima Prasad and Chris Miller (respectively editor and translator of the OUP volume) will address the challenges of presenting and translating Claire de Duras in the twenty-first century. 

Register to attend the event here. 

Venue: The Shulman Auditorium at The Queen's College, Oxford, Oxford, OX1 4AW 
 
About the Speakers 
 
Marie-Bénédicte Diethelm is a chercheuse associée at the CNRS/Sorbonne Université (CELLF-19-21). She has rediscovered, edited, introduced, and annotated Duras’s work, and is the editor of Humboldt’s Lettres à Claire de Duras (2016) and of Astolphe de Custine’s Aloys (2024) 
 
Pratima Prasad is Professor of French and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is a scholar of colonialism and nineteenth-century studies and the author of Colonialism, Race and the French Romantic Imagination (2009). 
 
Chris Miller is a freelance translator and literary critic who has published widely on poetry and poetry in translation. He has translated the Brazilian poets Érico Nogueira and Marco Catalão. 
 
This event is supported by the Queen's Translation Exchange.