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

Professor Cooper’s research interests are French Renaissance literature; relations between France and Italy in the Renaissance; Court Festivals; Renaissance antiquarians; Renaissance manuscript painting.

Tom Earle’s researches are concerned with Portuguese literature in the early modern period, especially poetry and drama; the historiography of the Portuguese expansion in Africa and Asia; scholarly editing; the history of the book, concentrating on books in Oxford libraries written in Latin by Portuguese scholars before 1640.

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.

Nigel Palmer’s research interests were 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. In 2013 he was awarded a honorary doctorate by the University of Bern. His work as editor of Oxford German Studies was featured in the celebratory volume 50/4. In 2022, he was awarded the inaugural Meister-Eckhart-Forschungspreis. 

Simon’s research focuses on literature and the visual arts from across the Portuguese-speaking world in the Early Modern period.

This post is generously supported by:

Research interests focus on the dialogue between vernacular and Latin culture, and on dialogue as a literary form. 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.

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 Liverpool University Press.

I work on early modern, and particularly eighteenth-century, French literature and cultural history.

My work is mainly on French writing of the eighteenth century, in particular the work of the encyclopedist, Denis Diderot. This takes me into a wide range of areas such as philosophical materialism, æsthetics and art criticism, questions of anonymity and authorship, and the many disputes, controversies and querelles that animated the Enlightenment and continue to animate its historiography. 

Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly has always been interested in German literature and culture from the late 15th to the 18th centuries within their European context, in women’s writing in all periods and in the representation of women in German literature and culture. She has made a special study of early modern court festivals of all kinds throughout Europe and of court culture. Her most recent research, however, has expanded its chronological range. Her book Beauty or Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present (OUP 2010) examines literature and art right up to the 1990s. Her most recent book, Projecting Imperial Power. New Nineteenth-Century Emperors and the Public Sphere, discusses new emperors in France, Austria, Germany, Brazil, Mexico and India from 1804 to 1947 (OUP 2021). She was the Project Leader of ‘Marrying Cultures: Queens Consort and European Identities, 1500-1800’, one of the 18 projects funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) as part of its ‘Cultural Encounters’ programme. The project involved collaboration with colleagues in Germany, Poland and Sweden. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and was awarded an honorary DLitt by the National University of Ireland in 2016.