World War II and onwards Research
Researchers
Dr Alberica Bazzoni
Honorary Faculty Research Fellow (Oxford) and Research Fellow (ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry)
Alberica Bazzoni is a Research Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. She completed her DPhil in Italian Literature at the University of Oxford, and then was Lector in Italian at the same university, Stipendiary Lecturer in Italian at St. Hugh’s College (2018-2019), and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick (2017-2020), with a project on gender and the Italian literary canon. Her main research areas are modern Italian literature, sociology of culture, gender and sexuality studies and philosophy of time.
Prof G Bonsaver
Research interests: modern Italian cultural history. Recently worked on censorship during the Fascist regime and on immigration in contemporary Italian cinema; currently working on the influence of U.S. culture in Post-Unification Italy.
Prof J A E Curtis
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.
Xon de Ros
Professor of Modern Spanish Studies
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.
Professor C Duttlinger
Carolin Duttlinger’s research interests are in modern German literature, thought, and visual culture, with a particular emphasis 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.
With Prof. Daniel Weidner (Humboldt University Berlin), she is heading an international research project on Walter Benjamin’s Journalistic Networks, funded by the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership.
See also her film on Franz Kafka’s novel Der Verschollene (Amerika): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHHyBy8al3k
Professor J M Fellerer
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 recently also held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to continue his ongoing work on language contact, urban dialects and multilingualism in L’viv and Łódź.
Prof R W Fiddian
Professor of Spanish, Fellow of Wadham College
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.
Dr T Fisher
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.
Dr K Gwyer
Kirstin Gwyer’s research interests are in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, with a particular focus on Holocaust literature and contemporary Jewish writing, postmodernism and post-postmodernism, literature since the Wende, and comparative contemporary aftermath writing.
Prof J Hiddleston
Jane Hiddleston’s research interests include francophonel iterature, postcolonial theory and literary theory. She teaches all areas of nineteenth and twentieth century French and Francophone literature.
Dr M B Holland
Emeritus Professor of French
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.
Prof C M Howells
Emeritus Professor of French
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 .
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.
Professor Polly Jones
Professor of Russian
Professor Polly Jones teaches a wide range of modern Russian literature, culture and language for the faculty and college, and has published widely on Soviet literature and cultural politics, especially of the post-Stalin period (1953-91). She also appears regularly on radio and TV to talk about Russian culture and history.
Prof M-C Killeen
Professor of French Literature, Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall
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.
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 T Kuhn
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.
Dr Holly Langstaff
I’m interested in modern and contemporary literature and thought. My research to date has focused on the work of Maurice Blanchot.
Prof K. J. Leeder
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: https://mmp.mml.ox.ac.uk/. She was elected to the Academia Europaea in 2020.
Dr Alexandra Lloyd
Lecturer in German
Dr Alex Lloyd teaches German language and literature from the mid-eighteenth to the twenty-first century, translation between German and English, and film studies. Her main research interests lie in twentieth-century literature and visual culture and cultural memory studies. She currently leads the White Rose Project, a research and engagement initiative bringing the story of the White Rose resistance circle to English-speaking audiences.
Dr L Lonsdale
Dr Laura Lonsdale, MA (Oxon), PhD.
Associate Professor in Modern Spanish Literature, Fellow of The Queen’s College
Prof I G Maclachlan
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, as is reflected in my most recent book on the autobiographical works of Louis-René des Forêts.
Prof M L McLaughlin
Italian Renaissance Literature; Renaissance Humanism; Renaissance Literary Theory; Renaissance Biography; Alberti; Petrarch; Poliziano; Tasso; The Classical Legacy in Italian Literature; Translation in the Renaissance; Contemporary Italian Fiction; Italo Calvino; Andrea De Carlo; Translation and Translation Studies.
Waqas Mirza
Lecturer & DPhil Candidate
French and English Literature of the 20th Century
Dr D P Moran
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.
Professor B Morgan
Ben Morgan’s main research interests are in German intellectual history (medieval mysticism, Nietzsche, early psychoanalysis, Heidegger, the Frankfurt School); German film (Fritz Lang, Leni Riefenstahl, the ‘Heimat’ film) and comparative literature. He has also worked on contemporary writing (Jelinek, Trojanow). His current projects are an account of the manuscript transmission of the late medieval mystical text ‘The Sister Catherine Treatise’ from the 1310s through to the early 17th-century; and, under the working title ‘Fiction and other minds’, an investigation in collaboration with Naomi Rokotnitz (Tel Aviv University) of the way fiction models and nurtures a complex understanding of human social interaction. Both projects are informed by a methodology which combines an analysis of historical context with phenomenology (particularly that of the early Heidegger) and recent developments in the cognitive sciences.
Professor Ève Morisi
Associate Professor of French, Fellow of St Hugh’s College
Ève Morisi’s research examines the interface of poetics, politics and ethics in French, Francophone, and comparative literature from the 19th to the 21st century. Several of her projects have focused on the ways in which literary representations of extreme violence and resistance have engaged critically with socio-political forms of oppression, State power, and lethal law at critical historical junctures.
Hugo and Baudelaire have been of particular interest for the 19th century; Camus and Algerian Francophone writers for the 20th and 21st centuries.
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.
Dr M A Nicholson
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).
Prof. Hilary Owen
Research Fellow in Portuguese
Professor Hilary Owen is Professor Emerita in Portuguese and Luso-African Studies at the University of Manchester and Research Fellow in the Sub-Faculty of Portuguese at Oxford University. She has worked extensively on Portuguese and Lusophone African women writers and feminist theory as well as researching on postcolonialism and contemporary Portuguese and Lusophone African cinema.
Professor D Papanikolaou
Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Cultural Studies, Fellow of St. Cross College
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 monographs on literature and popular music in France and Greece, queer Cavafy, the representation of the family in contemporary Greek literature, theatre and cinema and the recent New (or Weird) Wave in Greek cinema. Founding member of the editorial collectives of the Journal of Greek Media and Culture and the platform Greek Studies Now.
Professor G Paul
Georgina Paul works principally in the field of contemporary German literature. She specialises in the literature of the GDR (East Germany) and literature post-unification, and has published some important essays on Christa Wolf in particular. She also has a lively interest in gender issues — how gender is theorised, what it means to be a gendered subject, and how this is represented and reflected upon in literary texts. She is a published translator, both of scholarship and of contemporary poetry.
Professor C M Pazos-Alonso
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.
She is Co-Editor for the Peter Lang series ‘Reconfiguring Identities in the Portuguese-Speaking World’, https://www.peterlang.com/view/serial/RIP and is currently the Vice-President of the International Association of Lusitanists.
Jake Robertson
Working Thesis Title: Captive Audiences: Professional Theater, Patronage, and Creative Culture in Stalin’s Gulag.
Prof P Rothwell
Phillip specializes in the literatures and cultures of Portugal and Lusophone Africa.
Dr Charlotte Ryland
Editor, New Books in GermanNew Books in German
Charlotte Ryland is Director of the Stephen Spender Trust and founder of the Queen’s College Translation Exchange, both Oxford-based organisations that promote multilingualism, language-learning and translation. Charlotte is committed to languages outreach and to widening participation at university level, and was the founding co-ordinator of the Oxford German Network.
E K Skordyles
Lecturer in Modern Greek
Senior Lecturer in Modern Greek
Research interests: Translation Theory, especially translation and ideology, and translation and ludic language; Modern Greek History, especially nation building and minorities in Mod. Greece.
Dr Macs Smith
Career Development Fellow in French, Queen's CollegeCollege Profile
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.
Professor G A Stellardi
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.
Professor E Tandello
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.
Dr Cosmin Toma
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
My primary research interests lie in the areas of postwar and contemporary French literature, literary theory and aesthetics, with an emphasis on deconstruction and its precipitates.
Dr Serena Vandi
Powys Roberts Research Fellow in European Literature, St Hugh's College
Research
Dr J von Zitzewitz
Stipendiary Lecturer in Russian
My current main research interest is Russian poetry of the 20th and 21st century, including literary communities on the internet and the practice and theory of poetry translation. I have extensive experience studying late Soviet literature, in particular ‘underground’ literature of the 1970s, and a lively interest in Russian religious thought and its effect on literature.
Prof C Williams
Associate Professor, Brazilian Literature and Culture
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.
Prof E Williamson
Edwin Williamson is a literary scholar, biographer, and historian. His research interests are in the literature, culture, and history of Spanish America as well as early-modern Spain.
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.
