Enlightenment Research

Helen Fronius’s research interests are in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century German literature and culture. She has published on the role of German women writers in the Goethe era, and is currently editing a volume of collected essays on women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is also working on the depiction of infanticide in late eighteenth-century texts.

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.

Andrew Kahn, M.A., D.Phil. (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.

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 is working on a book on Rilke.

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.

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

I am interested in literature and the circulation of ideas, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am currently looking at Diderot’s Eléments de physiologie in the context of the thinking of his contemporaries on matter, physiology and consciousness. I want ideas and texts to be able to flow between French and English as much as they did in the period I study, and have therefore translated and edited a selection of Isabelle de Charrière’s novellas (Penguin Classics, 2012), and co-translated (with Kate Tunstall) Marian Hobson’s essays on the Enlightenment (SVEC, 2011) and Denis Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau (OpenBook Publishers, 2014), see here. I co-ordinated the translation by 102 students and colleagues of Tolerance: The Beacon of the Enlightenment which was published on the first anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations. You can read the book for free here. We also co-organised (with Isabelle Moreau of UCL) a conference on the topic of ‘Thinking Matter’ in May 2012. I am a member of the ANR funded research project on ‘Querelles’ in England and France in the Early Modern Period, see here.