Early Modern Studies Research

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.

Diana Berruezo-Sánchez brings together different threads of research that combine the Italian influence and the study of minorities in the Early Modern period. She has explored the literary relations between Spanish Golden Age texts and Italian sources, particularly the novella genre, in her PhD and a number of publications. Her principal interest lies in the way texts circulate beyond their national borders, creating a network of influences that is key to the understanding of the development of literary traditions. More recently, her interests have led her to explore the image of enslaved Black Africans in Early Modern Spanish literature and the enslaved African’s poetry in Spanish, for which she has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Her next monograph aims to uncover unheard poetry sung by 16^th- and 17^th-century enslaved Black Africans in Spain, as well as to interrogate –and reverse– enslaved Black African’s invisibility in the Iberian Peninsula.

Current Position

Honorary Faculty Research Fellow (Oxford) and Research Fellow (Padua, Italy)

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

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.

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.

Michael Hawcroft’s research interest is seventeenth-century French drama, especially Molière and Racine.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ruggero Sciuto is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. His research focuses on eighteenth-century French literature and philosophy, especially the works of Denis Diderot and Paul Thiry d’Holbach, and on diplomatic relations between European countries in the Early Modern Period.

https://boydellandbrewer.com/representing-the-dead-hb.htmlHelen 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 new book looks 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?

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.