Early Modern Studies Research

• My main research interests lie in medieval and early modern French literature, and in challenging the conventional distinction between them. As my postgraduate training was in Comparative Literature (French, Classics and Italian), I have a keen enthusiasm for working across national boundaries as well as chronological ones. My areas of specialty are literature and gender, courtly and erotic literature, and the influence of classical antiquity on medieval and early modern Europe.

Research

Dr 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.

Marco Dorigatti graduated from Florence and then obtained a doctorate from the University of Oxford. His primary field of research is the chivalric poem of the Italian Renaissance from Boiardo to Tasso, especially Ariosto. He has edited various digital texts for the Oxford Text Archive and has published numerous articles on Boiardo, Ariosto and the chivalric tradition in the Renaissance, with significant studies also on the modern period (Grazia Deledda, Sibilla Aleramo, Virginia Woolf, Giuseppe Dessì) and on cinema (Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman). He is above all a philologist, and in this capacity he has produced the first-ever critical edition of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso secondo la princeps del 1516 (Florence, Olschki, 2006), published under the High Patronage of the President of the Italian Republic. Related interests: textual criticism and editing, textual bibliography, history of the book, Renaissance theatre and Renaissance women writers.

I hold a BA in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge and an MSt in Modern Languages (French) from the University of Oxford. I was a visiting student at Harvard in 2013-14. 

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.

Professor Maclean’s main research interests are in the fields of Montaigne; Cardano; history of the book in the late Renaissance; history of law, medicine and theology in European universities; and Aristotelianism.

Italian Renaissance Literature; Renaissance Humanism; Renaissance Literary Theory; Renaissance Biography; Alberti; Petrarch; Poliziano; Tasso; The Classical Legacy in Italian Literature; Translation in the Renaissance;  Contemporary Italian Fiction; Italo Calvino; Andrea De Carlo; Translation and Translation Studies.

Oliver Noble Wood’s research interests focus on sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spanish culture, with particular emphasis on Baroque poetry, painting, and history of the book.

Richard Parish has worked on French seventeenth-century theatre (Racine: the limits of tragedy, 1993; editions of Bérénice, Phèdre, Le Tartuffe), comic fiction, and in particular on the writing of, or associated with, the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In addition to a book on the Lettres Provinciales (Pascal’s Lettres Provinciales: a study in polemic, 1989) and editions of La Bruyère (Dialogues sur le Quiétisme) and Voltaire / Condorcet (Eloge et Pensées de Pascal), he has recently published in book form the Bampton lectures which he delivered in 2009 (Catholic particularity in seventeenth-century France: Christianity is strange, 2011). He is currently working on the Mémoires of Saint-Simon.

My reseach interests focus on the dialogue between vernacular and Latin culture, and on dialogue as a literary form. Since 2009, I have been involved in Oxford’s first Marie Curie international training network in the humanities: the project on ‘Mobility of Ideas and Tranmission of Texts’ (MITT) studies the medieval transmission of learning from the universities to the wider readership that could be reached through the vernacular. Together with partners in Antwerp, Freiburg, Lecce, and Leiden, we have built up a network of 20 graduates and post-docs and held regular interdisciplinary workshops, including the Oxford confernce on ‘Medieval Women and their Books’, held jointly at the Talyorian and at Somerville in October 2012.

Recent publications include studies on the use of song in mystical writing, and collaborations with colleagues from musicology on the interplay between music and text in the ‘Jenaer Liederhandschrift’ (conference May 2014) and the ‘Carmina Burana’ manuscript. I am interested more generally in the relationship between cultures in the middle ages – Latin and the vernacular, manuscript and voice, lay and institution, and in the role which gender plays in negotiating such cultural tensions.

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.

Colin Thompson works primarily in Golden Age Spanish literature and has a particular interest in the writing of the Spanish mystics St Teresa of Ávila and St John of the Cross. His research interests include a wide range of Golden Age poetry and literary theory, the drama of Calderón, the prose fiction of Cervantes, and the relationship between literature and painting in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish art.

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.

Alain Viala’s main research are in the field of French Literature and Literary Theory.

Wes Williams’ main research interests are in the field of Renaissance and/or early modern literature; he has written a book on pilgrimage writing, and continues to explore travel narratives of various kinds across the period. He is now writing a book on monsters and their meanings from, roughly, Rabelais to Racine (by way of Shakespeare, Montaigne and a few others). He also works on European film, and in the theatre as a writer and director.