World War II and onwards Research

Professor Curtis’s published research has largely been focused on subversive writers of the early Stalin Period (1920s and 1930s). She has spent a great deal of time working in archives in Russia and abroad, and this has enabled her to publish a range of analytical and biographical studies of the life and works of the satirical novelist/playwright Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940). More recently she has turned her attention to Evgeny Zamiatin (1884-1937), an anti-utopian writer much admired by George Orwell. Recently she completed work on the first full biography of Zamiatin to appear in any language; she has also co-edited (with a St Petersburg colleague) a scholarly edition in Russian of his most famous novel, based on a unique typescript she discovered in an American archive.

Professor Curtis has developed a particular interest in Russian drama, and runs a specialist option for students which involves the study of plays from the 1820s right up to the present day. Over the last few years she has been involved in helping with productions of Russian plays in several British theatres (the RSC at Stratford, the Barbican and National Theatres in London, the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry) by providing cast workshops, writing programme features, working on translations, and advising directors and design staff. Future research plans include a study of the 21st-century theatre scene in Russia, parts of which have been notably bold in their challenges to the political establishment.

Carolin Duttlinger’s research interests are in modern German literature, thought and visual culture, with a particular focus on modernist and contemporary literature. She has worked on such areas as Weimar photography, on the history and theory of perception, on literature, memory and trauma, and on literature and anthropology. She has published widely on authors such as Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Robert Musil, Alfred Döblin, Elias Canetti, Ruth Klüger, Thomas Kling and W.G. Sebald. Her current principal research  project explores the dialectical interplay between attention and distraction in twentieth-century German culture.

Carolin Duttlinger is Co-Director of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre and a member of the Executive Board of the International Walter Benjamin Society. She writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement.

See also her film on Franz Kafka’s novel Der Verschollene (Amerika): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHHyBy8al3k 

Robin Fiddian’s interests lie in Spanish literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, Spanish film, and twentieth-century Spanish American literature.

DPhil Student in Spanish American Literature and Literary Translation. 

Jane Hiddleston’s research interests include francophoneliterature, postcolonial theory and literary theory. She teaches all areas of nineteenth and twentieth century French and Francophone literature. 

Christina Howells’s research work centres on Continental philosophy, literary theory, and twentieth-century French literature. She is particularly interested in post-war French thought, for example Sartre, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Foucault, Levi-Strauss and Levinas. She has also published with Routledge a Reader of articles by twenty-eight contemporary French women philosophers. Her latest monograph explores ideas of subjectivity and mortality in late twentieth-century French thought, and, together with Gerald Moore, she has recently co-edited a collection of essays on Bernard Stiegler for EUP .

Dr Polly Jones teaches a wide range of modern Russian literature and Russian language for the faculty and college, and has published widely on Soviet literature and cultural politics. Her research interests centre on 20th-century literature and culture, especially of the post-Stalin period (1953-91). She also writes regularly for the TLS and the Times Higher, and has appeared several times on BBC radio and TV to talk about Russian culture.

Marie-Chantal Killeen studied and taught in Canada, the U.S.A. and France before settling in Oxford in 2001 to take up a post at New College. She has been a French tutor at LMH since 2004.

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 examines 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.

My primary research interest is the relationship between technology, communication, the body, and collective politics. I focus in particular on how metaphors of disease (media parasites, viral media, smartphone addiction) govern the way we think about new communication technologies.

E. Tandello’s research interests include Contemporary Italian poetry (in particular the poetry of Amelia Rosselli), Modernist drama (Pirandello), 20th century poetry in dialect; Leopardi.

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.