World War II and onwards Research

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.

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 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 

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.

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.

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’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.

I work on Russian literature and Russian cultural history from the late eighteenth century to the present day, and I have published a large number of books and articles on topics including urban history (St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past, Yale University Press, 2014), gender history and women’s writing, the history of childhood (Children’s World, Yale University Press, 2008 and Comrade Pavlik, Granta 2005, Russian translation 2009, Czech translation in process). I am the author, for Oxford University Press, of the Very Short Introduction to Russian Literature,  and the editor of the anthology Utopias for Penguin. Soviet Art House, a study of Lenfil’m studio in the 1960s-1980s, appeared with Oxford University Press New York in 2021. I am now starting work on a ‘history and film’ project (focussing on the USSR after 1953) and am also writing a book in the ‘Russian Shorts’ series (Bloomsbury Publishing), Russian Food since 1800: Empire at Table. Lockdown experience of baking and fermentation has come in handy! I enjoy working with graduate and undergraduate students in my particular areas of interest, and regularly organise events such as visiting lectures and talks and film showings in order to bring Russian culture to a wider public.

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.

I’m interested in twentieth-century literature and thought, particularly the work of Maurice Blanchot.  

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 outreach initiative bringing the story of the White Rose resistance circle to English-speaking audiences. 

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.

Lecturer & DPhil Candidate

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 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 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 has recently completed 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.

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.

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.

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.

Research

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.