World War II and onwards Research

Faithful Deicides: Contemporary French Thought and Enchantment After the Death of God

Spanish literature of the modern period (C19th and C20th), especially modernismo, poetry, cinema, music and the visual arts. More recently my interests have extended  to questions of gender and sexual difference in representation. Member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cilavs/ ), University of London (Birkbeck), and of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing (CCWW: http://www.igrs.sas.ac.uk/research/CCWW.htm ) at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London (IGRS). Member of the editorial committee of HiPLAM (Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Monographs Bristol, and of FEDRO. Revista de estética y teoría de las artes (www.institucional.us.es/fedro ) of the University of Seville.

Jan Fellerer works on the history of Polish, Czech and Ukrainian with special reference to the modern period from the late 18th century to the present day; until recently also in the context of an AHRC funded research project as principal investigator: http://subcultures.mml.ox.ac.uk. His areas of interest in Slavonic linguistics include topics in lexical semantics and syntax, especially word order, argument structure and argument realization. He held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2017 to continue his ongoing work on language contact, urban dialects and multilingualism in L’viv and Łódź.

Tyler Fisher works principally on metaliterary and self-reflexive imagery in Spanish poetry, autobiography, and short fiction. His ongoing research projects include a study of autobiographical testimonies from inquisitional procesos, and an analysis of microcuentos by the present-day author José María Merino.

Kirstin Gwyer’s research interests are in twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature, with a particular focus on Holocaust literature and contemporary German-Jewish and American-Jewish writing, postmodernism and post-postmodernism, and literature since the Wende.

Michael Holland’s main research area is the work of Maurice Blanchot. This entails more generally an interest in French literature and thought from 1848 onwards, and in French politics since 1870. In addition, he has done research in the field of avant-garde theatre since late nineteenth century, from Jarry and Mallarmé to Ionesco.

Ann Jefferson is currently working on a biography of Nathalie Sarraute, due out in September 2019.

Catriona Kelly works on Russian literature and on Russian cultural history, particularly Russian modernism, gender history, the history of childhood, national identity, and the recent history of Leningrad/St Petersburg. She has published a large number of books and articles in these areas, sponsored by grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy (see http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/russian/childhood). From 2007 to 2011, she led a large international project on Russian national identity, sponsored by a major grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (see http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/russian/nationalism). Her study of cultural memory in Leningrad/St Petersburg since 1957, supported by work in archives, interviews, and first-hand observation as well as work with printed sources, St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past, was published by Yale University Press in 2014. Soviet and Post-Soviet Identities, co-edited with Mark Bassin, came out in 2012 from Cambridge University Press. Other interests include oral history (for information about the Oxford Archive of Life History, see http://www.ehrc.ox.ac.uk/lifehistory). Catriona Kelly also works as a literary translator, particularly of poetry, and writes for the general literary press (particularly The Guardian and The Times Literary Supplement). She is on the editorial board of several journals, including Kritika, Slavic Review, Slavonic and East European Review, and Antropologicheskii forum/Forum for Anthropology and Culture (St Petersburg). In 2013, she was pre-elected President of the Association of Slavic„ East European, and Eurasian Studies, USA (ASEEES) for 2015. She is the first person not working at a US university to hold this position.

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.

Tom Kuhn’s main research interests are in political literature in the 20th century. He has worked particularly on Bertolt Brecht, and is the series editor of the main English-language edition of Brecht’s works. In addition, he has written on exile and anti-fascist literature, and on more recent drama. He is currently leading the ‘Writing Brecht’ project. Outputs include several major new publications of Brecht’s work in English. He is also working on a book on Brecht’s use of visual art and other pictorial material.

Karen Leeder has published widely on modern German culture, especially of the post-1945 and contemporary periods; her interests range from poetry and the poetic tradition to modernity, GDR literature; contemporary German culture, lateness, women’s writing, angels, spectres, translation, Rilke and Brecht. She has been awarded grants by HEFCE, the British Academy and the AHRC for projects, most recently an AHRC Fellowship to work on her Spectres of the GDR: The Haunting of the Berlin Republic.
She is a prize-winning translator of contemporary German literature: including Evelyn Schlag, Raoul Schrott, Michael Krüger, Durs Grünbein, Volker Braun and Ulrike Almut Sandig and and has been awarded residences in UK and Berlin. She is co-editor of the Companions to Contemporary German Culture series with de Gruyter, is on the board of a number of journals including International Brecht Society Yearbook, OGS, German Monitor and The German Quarterly and has published reviews in a variety of newspapers and journals as well as appearing regularly on radio and television. She was  Knowledge Exchange Fellow with the Southbank Centre, London 2014-2015 and continues to work on her project Mediating Modern Poetry: http://www.mmp.mml.ox.ac.uk/

My core teaching and research interests are in modern Spanish literature, especially 20th century narrative and theatre. 

My main research interests lie in the field of 20th-century French literature and philosophy, and particularly the relationship between those domains. I have published on writers and thinkers such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Samuel Beckett, Roger Laporte, and Jean-Luc Nancy, and on topics that include literary time, reading and the senses, the role of the imagination, and the responsibilities of the writer. Life writing is another interest of mine, and I’m currently engaged in a study of the autobiographical works of Louis-René des Forêts.

DPhil Candidate & Tutor

French and English Literature of the 20th Century

My broad area of research is twentieth Spanish American literature, with a particular interest in the avant-garde poetry of the 1920s and 1930s, especially that of Neruda and Vallejo. I am currently working on two series of commentaries, one on a selection of poems from Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra, the other on poems from Vallejo’s Trilce, focusing in particular on specific problems of interpretation and evaluation raised by difficult poetry. I am also interested in prose fiction, especially that of Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Ève Morisi’s research seeks to interrogate some of the intersections of poetics, politics and ethics in French and Francophone literature. Part of it focuses on the representations of extreme violence and resistance in both prose and poetry from the 19^th century to the present day. Hugo and Baudelaire have been of particular interest for the 19^th century; Camus and Algerian Francophone writers for the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

The bulk of Nicholson’s publications have been on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov, with other writings on Dostoevsky, Pil’nyak, D.S. Mirsky and Maurice Baring.  He spent two years as O’Connor Visiting Professor at Colgate University and in 2005 was made an Honorary Professor of Henan University, China.  His current project is a study of Solzhenitsyn’s writing in the 1930s to 1950s, and he has translated several of Solzhenitsyn’s  writings, most recently the literary film scenario Tanks Know the Truth (2013).

Dimitris Papanikolaou’s research focuses on the ways Modern Greek literature opens a dialogue with other cultural forms (especially Greek popular culture) as well as other literatures and cultures; the other important strand of his research focuses on queer theory, the history of Greek queer cultures, and the difference they can make in people’s lives and social movements. He has written the monographs:  Singing Poets: Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece (Legenda, 2007), “Those people made like me”: C.P.Cavafy and the poetics of sexuality (Patakis, 2014, in Greek) and There is something about the family: Nation, desire and kinship at a time of crisis (Patakis, 2018, in Greek). He is currently writing Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of  Biopolitics, for Edinburgh University Press.

Cláudia Pazos-Alonso’s research examines Portuguese and Brazilian literature from the nineteenth century to the present day and twentieth century literature from Portuguese-speaking Africa. Her interests include genre and gender, canon-formation; women writers and images of women; Portuguese modernism; the role of literature in colonial and post-colonial representations of the nation.

Charlotte Ryland’s research interests are in German literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on the intersection between literature and politics, on the representation of the Holocaust, and on comparative literature and translation. Her PhD thesis, on the poetry and translations of the post-Holocaust poet Paul Celan, was published in early 2010: ‘Paul Celan’s Encounters with Surrealism: Trauma, Translation and Shared Poetic Space’ (Legenda). She is editor of the bi-annual journal New Books in German and Postdoctoral Researcher on the Writing Brecht project in the Modern Languages faculty at Oxford. Charlotte is committed to languages outreach and to widening participation at university level, and was the founding co-ordinator of the Oxford German Network.

Research interests: Translation Theory, especially translation and ideology, and translation and ludic language; Modern Greek History, especially nation building and minorities in Mod. Greece.

Giuseppe Stellardi studied in Pavia and Paris and worked in Cape Town and Lancaster, before joining Oxford University . His main research areas lie in modern Italian literature, but he’s also interested in literary theory and continental philosophy. He has written on Dossi, Tarchetti, Michelstaedter, Svevo, Gadda, Moravia, Eco, Morante; also, on Deconstruction (Derrida), on Pensiero debole (Vattimo), and on metaphor. He has published a book on metaphor in Derrida and Heidegger, and one on the work of Carlo Emilio Gadda, as well as a translation in English of Carlo Michelstaedter’s “La persuasione e la rettorica”. He currently works on temporality in 20th-century Italian literature.

I specialise in poetry of the post-war period, with a particular interest in comparing British and German literature. My current research project examines representations of extra-terrestrial space in twentieth century poetry.

Claire Williams’ research focuses on women’s writing and minority writing from the Lusophone world, particularly Clarice Lispector (Brazil), Maria Gabriela Llansol and Maria Ondina Braga (Portugal), and Lília Momplé (Mozambique). Her interests also include the cultural representations of favelas and travel writing.