Enlightenment Research
Researchers
Petr Budrin
2nd Year DPhil, Clarendon Scholar
B.A. (Hons) in Journalism, Moscow State University
M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto
Prof N E Cronk
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 H Fronius
College Lecturer in German at Exeter College
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.
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 is currently working on a biography of Nathalie Sarraute, due out in September 2019.
Prof A S Kahn
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.
Prof K M Kohl
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 is working on a book on Rilke.
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 co-director of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre (with Carolin Duttlinger and Katrin Kohl) and of the Besterman Centre for the Enlightenment (with Nicholas Cronk), and 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 Gemma Tidman
Supernumerary Teaching Fellow in French, St John's College
My research focuses on early modern, and specifically eighteenth-century, French literature and cultural history. I have recently completed my doctoral thesis, entitled ‘Ce qui s’enseigne. The Querelle des collèges and the Emergence of Littérature, 1750–1789’.
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, the novel, into questions of anonymity and authorship, and into the many disputes, controversies, and querelles that animated the Enlightenment.
Dr C Warman
Associate Professor in French, Fellow of Jesus College
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.
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.
