Early Modern Studies Research

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.

Member of the AHRC-funded project ‘Petrarch Commentary and Exegesis in Renaissance Italy, c.1350-c.1650’
 

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.

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.

Nigel Palmer’s research interests are 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.

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

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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 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?

My research focuses on the historical sociolinguistics of multilingualism and language contact, most recently in the context of colonial Louisiana. Other research interests include comparative Romance linguistics and language variation and change in early and late modern French and Spanish.

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, which takes me into a wide range of areas such as philosophical materialism, æsthetics and art criticism, the novel, into questions of anonymity and authorship, and into the many disputes, controversies, and querelles that animated the Enlightenment. 

Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly’s main research interests are in German literature and culture from the late 15th to the early 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 book is Beauty or Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present (OUP 2010). She is 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 involves collaboration with colleagues in Germany, Poland and Sweden. She is a Fellow of the British Academy.

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.