Early Modern Studies Research
Researchers
Mai-Britt Wiechmann
DPhil student at Somerville College specializing in Middle Low German literature, incunabula and early printed books, and the history of piety.
Dr A B Penafiel
British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow in Portuguese
André Penafiel was a Clarendon Scholar; his doctoral thesis (2016) focuses on arguably the most important genre within medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric, the cantigas d’amor. He is currently a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow working on Camões’s Os Lusíadas, the Portuguese national poem.
Dr C Bateman
Stipendiary Lecturer in French, Lady Margaret Hall and University College
- 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.
Dr Diana Berruezo-Sánchez
Honorary Research Fellow
BA Spanish Philology, BA Italian Philology, M.A. Romance Philology, PhD Spanish Philology (University of Barcelona)
Dr Giacomo Comiati
Honorary Faculty Research Fellow
Current Position
Honorary Faculty Research Fellow (Oxford) and Research Fellow (Padua, Italy)
Prof R A Cooper
Emeritus Professor of French
Professor Cooper’s research interests are French Renaissance literature; relations between France and Italy in the Renaissance; Court Festivals; Renaissance antiquarians; Renaissance manuscript painting.
Dr Marco Dorigatti
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.
Prof T F Earle
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.
Prof N Gardini
The Renaissance; Stylistics and poetics; poetry; autobiographical fiction; translation from Latin and Greek, and from English. I am currently working on a book exploring lacuna and omission in the construction of literary sense.
Dr Jessica Goodman
Associate Professor of French, Fellow of St Catherine's College
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.
Dr Michael Hawcroft
Michael Hawcroft’s research interest is seventeenth-century French drama, especially Molière and Racine.
Prof. Henrike Lähnemann
Chair of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics
Henrike Lähnemann’s research interests are medieval manuscripts, the relationship of text and images and how vernacular and Latin literature are connected, currently mainly in late medieval Northern German convents (Letters of the nuns from Lüne, and the edition of prayer-books from the Abbey of Medingen). A major theme is the engagement with the Reformation. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the FRIAS.
Prof I W F Maclean
Emeritus Professor of French
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.
Prof G J Mallinson
Emeritus Professor of French
Jonathan Mallinson works on French theatre and prose fiction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He has a special interest in comedy, prose fiction, women’s writing, and in the reception of canonical neo-classical writers in the Enlightenment. Current research projects include a critical edition of Voltaire’s Lettres d’Amabed, and a book on the seventeenth-century French novel.
Prof M L McLaughlin
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.
Dr J Muñoz-Basols
Senior Lecturer in Spanish
Javier Muñoz-Basols’ principal research interests are: Spanish language, translation studies, applied linguistics, stylistics and literary linguistics, humour studies and cultural studies. He has also published on Early-modern and medieval Spanish literature, Latin American cultural studies and modern Spanish literature. His current research focuses on cross-linguistic lexical influence and the interaction between language and culture in various settings, including contemporary literature and humour.
Dr O Noble Wood
University Lecturer in Golden Age Spanish Literature
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.
Dr Jennifer Oliver
Departmental Lecturer in French, Worcester College
My research is centred on sixteenth-century French literature, culture, and thought, and I teach across the early modern period and beyond. My first book, Shipwreck in French Renaissance Writing: The Direful Spectacle, was published by OUP in 2019.
Prof N F Palmer
Emeritus Professor of German Medieval and Linguistic Studies, Fellow of St Edmund Hall
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.
Prof R J Parish
Emeritus Professor of French
Richard Parish passed away on 1 January 2022.
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 has recently worked on the Mémoires of Saint-Simon.
Prof Simon Park
Associate Professor in Medieval and Renaissance Portuguese
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:
Dr Ruggero Sciuto
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Ruggero Sciuto is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and a fellow of St Edmund Hall.
Professor A M V Suerbaum
Faculty Chair; Associate Professor in German, Fellow of Somerville
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.
Professor Helen J Swift
Professor of Medieval French Studies, Fellow of St Hilda's College
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. Her first book examined the literary and rhetorical structures of literary defences of women written by men in the period after Christine de Pizan. Her second book looked at questions of identity construction and narrative voice in late medieval France through the lens of literary epitaphs in response to the question: who am I when I am dead?
Prof Jonathan W Thacker
King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies and Fellow of Exeter College
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.
Revd Dr C P Thompson
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.
Dr Gemma Tidman
Supernumerary Teaching Fellow in French, St John's College
I work on early modern, and particularly eighteenth-century, French literature and cultural history.
Dr Paola Tomè
Marie Curie Fellow
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.
Professor Dr Kate E Tunstall
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.
Prof A Viala
Emeritus Professor of French
Alain Viala passed away on 30th June 2021. His main research was in the field of French Literature and Literary Theory.
Prof H Watanabe-O'Kelly
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.
Prof W Williams
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.
Professor Valerie Worth
My research focuses on early modern French literature and history (c. 1500-1700), the history of medicine, and translation studies.
