Enlightenment Research
Researchers
Prof N E Cronk
Professor of European Enlightenment Studies
As General Editor of the Complete Works of Voltaire, my main research interests are related to Voltaire, in particular his historical writings, his correspondence, his poetry, the Lettres philosophiques, and the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie. I am also interested in the French Enlightenment more generally, in the history of the book (in particular the illustrated book) and in questions of critical editing.
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 K Hilliard
Kevin Hilliard’s research is mainly in 18th-century literature and intellectual history. He also makes occasional excursions into 19th- and 20th-century literary studies.
Prof A M Jefferson
Emeritus Professor of French
Ann Jefferson’s biography of Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999) was published by Flammarion in a French translation by Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat and Aude de Saint-Loup in 2019. The English version (Princeton University Press) came out in 2020.
Prof A S Kahn FBA
Andrew Kahn, M.A., D.Phil, FBA (B.A. Amherst, M.A. Harvard)
Professor of Russian Literature,
Fellow and Tutor, St Edmund Hall,
Lecturer at Queen’s College
Andrew has been visiting professor at Columbia University, the University of California Berkeley, and in 2018 will be visiting professor at the École Normale supérieure in Paris. He is on various editorial boards, and for Peter Lang edits a series called Russian Transformations. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Prof K M Kohl
Faculty Lecturer in German, Fellow of Jesus College
Katrin Kohl’s research focuses on literature and cultural politics in the eighteenth and twentieth/twenty-first century. She is currently working on an edition of the poetic correspondence between Rainer Maria Rilke and Erika Mitterer, investigating dialogic processes in the period of modernism. Other research interests include the Prussian king Frederick the Great; the work of the eighteenth-century poet F.G. Klopstock; the work of holocaust-survivor H.G. Adler; and the theory and practice of metaphor.
Dr C Louth
Charlie Louth’s main research interests include poetry from the 18th century onwards, especially Goethe, Hölderlin, Mörike, Rilke and Celan; romanticism; translation; and comparative literature. He has translated Hölderlin’s letters, and done a new translation of Rilke’s Briefe an einen jungen Dichter and Brief des jungen Arbeiters. He has recently published Rilke: The Life of the Work (OUP, 2020).
Professor B Murnane
My main areas of research are the literature and culture of the ‘threshold period’ between 1780 and 1830, modernism, and contemporary drama. Increasingly I have been working in the field of Medical Humanities and the Enlightenment Studies.
Prof Roger Pearson
Emeritus Professor of French; Emeritus Fellow of The Queen's College
My research interests lie in the field of French literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My research has focused in particular, and at different times, on the works of Voltaire, Stendhal, Zola, Maupassant, and Mallarmé. From 2009 to 2011 I held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a project entitled ‘Moses or Orpheus? The Poet as Lawgiver in Nineteenth-Century French Literature’, in which I set out to examine how poets and writers envisaged the role of the poet and the nature and function of the ‘poetic’ during the period. My book Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France: Chateaubriand-Staël-Lamartine-Hugo-Vigny was published by Oxford University Press in April 2016, and I am now working on a sequel, to include discussion of Nerval, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Laforgue, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, among others.
Prof R Robertson
Ritchie Robertson is interested in a wide range of authors and topics in the period from 1750 onwards, notably Kafka; Heine; Schiller; Austrian literature; and the Enlightenment as an international movement. He is convenor of the monograph series Germanic Literatures, published by Legenda.He is currently completing a general study of the Enlightenment for Penguin Books, and is planning a study of Machiavelli’s reception in Germany from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century.
Dr Ruggero Sciuto
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
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.
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.
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, which takes me into a wide range of areas such as philosophical materialism, æsthetics and art criticism, into questions of anonymity and authorship, and into the many disputes, controversies, and querelles that animated the Enlightenment, and continue to animate its historiography.
Professor Caroline Warman
Professor of French Literature and Thought, Fellow of Jesus College
I work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French writing, and have published on Diderot and Sade, and on aspects of literary, cultural and medical history. I have translated a number of works by Diderot, Isabelle de Charrière, and others. I teach across this broad area.
Prof A Zorin
Research: Russian Literature and Cultural History of XVIII early XIX centuries in European Context. Russian Literature and Ideology. Cultural History of Emotions. Late Soviet and Post Soviet Literature.
