Queen's Now

Viewing archives for Modern Languages and Joint Schools

Introduction

Originally from Germany, I came to the UK as a student and enjoyed it so much that I never went back. I’m loving life in Oxford as a lecturer, researcher, city guide author, Morris dancer, and creative writer. Previously, I have researched Language Learning on Oxford’s Creative Multilingualism programme, taught German language and literature to learners of all ages, and developed research-based language teaching resources. I’m also currently researching digital and non-digital pedagogies in the language classroom. I’m super curious person, and my enthusiasm for learning is only rivalled by my passion for teaching!

Teaching

In my role as Lektorin I teach undergraduates from the Queen’s, St Catherine’s and St John’s College. I prepare students for the Prelims Paper I and the essay part of FHS Paper I, as well as for the oral exams.

Research

My research interests centre on motivation for language learning, digital and non-digital pedagogies, and creativity in the language classroom. My work is interdisciplinary, bringing together the -for me- most exciting aspects of Education, Applied Linguistics, Psychology, and Languages.

Publications

Some of my recent publications include:

  • Krüsemann, H., & Graham, S. (2024). ‘Learning German is like … ’: How learner representations, motivational beliefs, and perceptions of public views relate to motivation for continuing German study. The Language Learning Journal, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2024.2388116
  • Graham, S., Zhang, P., Hofweber, J., Fisher, L., & Krüsemann, H. (2024). Literature and second language vocabulary learning: The role of text type and teaching approach. The Modern Language Journal, 108,  579-600.  https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12946

About me

I am from Kent and I study French and German. As to why I chose it, there isn’t really another answer but simply that I absolutely love both languages! The course here has exactly the right amount of theatre, poetry, translation and grammar. I also love music and theatre – especially musical theatre (!) – and I am a keen swimmer.

College experience

A lot of people say that their college is the friendliest – but the people at Queen’s really are as friendly as it gets. It’s such a privilege to be able to study not just in a beautiful place, but surrounded by people who encourage and support you no matter what.

Oxford life

I start off the day by having a chat at breakfast in college, although occasionally if me and a friend are going to the same lecture we’ll get a toastie from Taylor’s on the way (highly recommend). Then I’ll spend a few hours in the library making sure I’m ready for the afternoon’s tutorial before lunch. The tutorials are all an hour long and we discuss (with usually one other student) something that we’ve written. After dinner there’s always something going on – whether it’s a pizza social or a birthday, and I’ll finish the day off in the library again preparing for the next day’s work!

Advice for applicants

Pick what you love! If you absolutely love a subject, everything else will fall into place. It’s probably also worth looking at past admissions tests before your own, just to get a sense of what will be expected of you (although of course, this is just one part of a much bigger application!).

No question is a silly question! Admissions people are always there to help so do ask whatever you like – whether it’s about travel grants or the quality of the puddings here (which is very high).

Introduction

I grew up in London and Hertfordshire and attended local comprehensive schools. From 2014–18, I completed a BA in History and French at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and after graduating spent a year working for charity and campaign organisations. In 2019, I returned to Oxford to complete an MSt in Women’s Studies, and the following year I began my PhD in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at King’s College London. My PhD was supervised by Professor Siobhán McIlvanney and Dr Ros Murray and funded by the AHRC through the London Arts & Humanities Partnership. During my PhD, I spent three months as a visiting research student at the Gender Studies centre (l’Initiative Genre-Philomel) at Sorbonne Université (Paris-IV). After submitting my PhD, I worked as an LSE100 Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I currently sit on the committees of the Society for French Studies and Women in French UK-Ireland. As of October 2024, I am the Hamilton Junior Research Fellow in French at Queen’s.

Teaching

I have experience teaching French literature, French language, film, and critical theory. I currently offer an Option Course called ‘Feminist Perspectives on Abortion’ on the interdisciplinary MSt in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Oxford.

Research

My research sits at the intersection of French Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. As Hamilton Junior Research Fellow, I am carrying out a research project on the representation of abortion in French literature and film since the year 2000. This project examines how abortion is put into and regulated through narrative, revealing the epistemic exclusion of certain perspectives on abortion across narrative forms. It interrogates the relationship between abortion rights and French national identity, shedding light on the position of abortion in the French Republican postcolonial imaginary. In this project, I analyse works by writers and filmmakers including Audrey Diwan, Suzanne Duval, Annie Ernaux, Line Papin, Colombe Schneck, Céline Sciamma, and Sandra Vizzavona.

I am also preparing my doctoral thesis for publication as a monograph. My thesis examines the ‘queer-feminist aesthetics’ of the contemporary French writer and filmmaker, Virginie Despentes, and uses Despentes’s work as a prism to think through the relationship between feminist and queer, and politics and art, in the twenty-first century.

Publications

Redefining Womanhood: Agency, Voice, and Identity in Francophone Women’s Cultural Production, ed. V. Desnain, A. Pugh, and C. Verdier (Peter Lang, forthcoming).

‘Sex and Subversion in French Women’s Writing from the Fin de siècle to the Present’ in The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in French, ed. S. Jordan and S. McIlvanney (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Review of Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement by Lisa Greenwald, H-France (forthcoming).

‘Disruption and Eruption: Terrorist Violence in the Work of Virginie Despentes’ in Disruptive Discourses in Francophone Women’s Writing, ed. P. Galis, C. Gorman, and J. Rodgers (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming).

‘Unbecoming Woman: The Shadow Feminism of King Kong théorie by Virginie Despentes’, Paragraph 46:2 (2023), 212–25.

‘Tracing the Figure of Roland Barthes in The Argonauts: A “many-gendered mother” of Maggie Nelson’s Heart’, College Literature: Journal of Critical Literary Studies 50:4 (2023), 547–71.

‘The Promise of Utopia in Vernon Subutex by Virginie Despentes’, French Studies Bulletin 43:163 (2022), 3–8.

‘Virginie Despentes’, The Literary Encyclopedia (2022).

‘Virginie Despentes: King Kong théorie’, The Literary Encyclopedia (2022).

Introduction

After studying history as an undergraduate, I completed my MPhil and DPhil (2022) in Chinese Studies at Oxford with time spent at Peking University and National Taiwan University along the way. Prior to coming to Queen’s in October 2024, I was a researcher at National Taiwan Central Library (2022) in Taipei and Lee Kai Hung Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Manchester China Institute (2023-24). I also worked as a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester (2023-24), where I taught courses on modern Chinese literature, East Asian visual culture and Japanese imperial history.

Research

My research looks at the Japanese Empire and its legacy in China and Taiwan. I am currently completing my first monograph, which looks at women’s writing, gendered citizenship, colonial history and translation politics in Taiwan from 1930 to the present day. Whilst at Queen’s, I am also beginning work on a new project exploring cultures of scarcity during the Sino-Japanese war (1937-45).

Publications

‘For a list of publications, please see my faculty profile‘

Introduction

After attending a French state school, I studied Franco-German studies for my undergrad at La Sorbonne (Paris IV) and the university of Bonn. I did my masters in German and Comparative Literature at the university of Bonn and St Andrews. I am now currently finishing my DPhil in German and French. I have taught at several colleges and for my faculty before coming to Queen’s as a stipendiary lecturer.

Teaching

I teach German prelims in literature (Paper III and IV), first-years German to English translation, and the literature paper on modern German poetry (Paper VIII).

Research

My research deals with women’s writing at the end of the nineteenth century in France, Germany, and Norway. I am interested in how feminist writers were responding to contemporary debates around womanhood, sexuality, and mental health through their fiction.

Introduction

Having attended my local comprehensive school and sixth-form college, I read History and French at St Hilda’s College, Oxford (2013–17), followed by a MSt in French at St Catherine’s College, Oxford (2019) and a PhD in French at Clare College, Cambridge (2019–23). I am pleased to be returning to Oxford in 2024 to take up the position of Stipendiary Lecturer in French at Queen’s.

Teaching

I teach French literature of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries to first- and second- year students of French (Papers III, IV, and VIII), as well as literary translation and critical theory. For Paper VIII (the second-year period paper), I encourage students to read across a range of literary works written in French since the revolutionary upheavals of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. In tutorials, I am particularly interested to explore how contemporary critical concerns (e.g. analyses of coloniality/colonialism, modernity, ecology, and gender) change the ways in which we understand literary history, and what happens to those concerns when they pass through sustained analysis of literary texts and their contexts.

Research

My research investigates how novels published at the centre of the collapsing French empire (c. 1944–1979) deal with the promises and devastations of an advancing modernity. My PhD argued that experiments with the French novel between 1957 and 1966 configured everyday life as a ground of human existence and a resource for ethical enquiry. Through close readings of four novels – Michel Butor’s La Modification (1957), Georges Perec’s Les Choses (1965), Nathalie Sarraute’s Le Planétarium (1959), and Marguerite Duras’s Le Vice-Consul (1966) – I argued for the significance of narrative fiction in the development of a conceptual history of everyday life, and particularly for its capacity to reflect on the conditions of possibility for thinking ethics through everydayness. My postdoctoral project will explore the notion that the postwar period in metropolitan France was marked by an historically unprecedented set of conditions for living well. Through the close reading of literary fiction, I am seeking to recover structures of feeling whose relation to major historico-philosophical concepts – optimism, solidarity, coloniality (e.g.) – challenge the historiographical commonplace according to which France experienced ‘thirty glorious years’ after the war.

A Day in the Life

Morning – I normally wake up around 8am, except if I’m going rowing. This is split between earlier mornings (6:30am!) and afternoon sessions. Early morning sessions are always worth it because we go to Hall for breakfast, e.g. hash browns and eggs.

Morning work – for humanities, there is normally a huge range of lectures on offer, but you select the ones that are most relevant to what you’ll be covering in classes and tutorials. I go to one-two lectures a day on average, but this can be flexible – it’s often about finding the lecturers who you know will be most interesting, and strategically picking what to go to!

If I’m not in a lecture, I normally use the morning as my main time to work. There are loads of beautiful libraries in Oxford, so it’s great to change around to add variety, but I like the modern part of the Queen’s library most, because of its big shared desks where you can sit with your friends even if working independently.

Lunch – this is always one of the best bits of the day, when everyone has a break from work together to eat lunch in Hall. At Queen’s it’s quite reasonably priced (around £3.00 for a full cooked meal), and is a great time to catch up with everyone.

Afternoon – tutorials and classes are normally in the afternoons. For my degree, my main task for the week is writing a 2,000 word essay, which you have a tutorial on. This is where you and your tutor talk about your essay in more depth. This really doesn’t feel like a test or interview, although they’re very good at stretching your thinking and getting you to come up with new ideas on the spot! It’s nice to be in a small group, often with just one other student, because the tutors will talk about shared ideas between your essays, which often means you see the question in new ways. Classes are similar to tutorials, except it’s with more people (normally four to eight, for me), and you don’t write an essay beforehand; the tutor will set some reading to do before, and we’ll talk about this during the class.

For Spanish, I have two hours of grammar and translation classes a week. This sometimes means doing some work (e.g. a translation) before the class, which we then go through, and talk about grammar in more detail. These classes are taught centrally, rather than in College, so it’s also a good time to meet people doing your subject who aren’t in your college cohort.

Evening – this is often when uni sport happens, if there hasn’t been a morning session. For rowing, we’ll often have a water session or fitness around 5pm – it’s really important for me to do this and take a break from work, but also have a social group around college sport.

I rarely ever work later than 7pm, so it means that the evenings are generally free for socialising. This might be a chilled pub / college bar trip, or cooking and then chatting in someone’s room. College has bigger organised social events every two weeks or so, called BOPs, which are always really fun!

Work-life Balance

It’s definitely true that the Oxford workload is a challenge, but the myths make it sound worse than it is! I’ve never felt like I’ve had to pull an all-nighter; I find that it’s about being consistent and organised, rather than leaving things to the last minute. The tutors are all lovely people too, and definitely don’t want you to stress more than you have to – they encourage you to talk to them first if you’re struggling with the workload.

The thing about Oxford is that it’s INTENSE – you’re fitting a lot of work, but also a lot of fun social things into a short eight-week term. But it’s really important that you’re not just working. It’s definitely possible to hand in all your work in on time, but also be doing a sport, sleeping, and socialising. It might just mean that you use the holidays to consolidate things from last term, and do next term’s pre-reading.

Charlotte Ryland founded the Translation Exchange (QTE) in 2018. She is also Director of the Stephen Spender Trust (SST), a charity that promotes language learning and literary translation. Through both organisations she aims to engage people of all ages and backgrounds in literary translation, and to bring creative translation into UK schools.

Until 2019 Charlotte ran New Books in German, a UK-based project that promotes German-language literature across the world, and was a Lecturer in German at Queen’s.

Selected Publications

‘When Learners Become Linguists: Content – Culture – Community’, in Languages, Society and Policy (2021)

‘We Actually Created a Good Mood!’: Metalinguistic and literary engagement through collaborative translation in the secondary classroom’, co-authored with Clementine Beauvais, in Language, Culture and Curriculum (2020)

‘Collaboration and Commitment: German-Language Books across Borders, in Transnational German Studies (Liverpool, 2020)

Paul Celans Encounters with Surrealism: Trauma, Translation and Shared Poetic Space (Oxford: Legenda, 2010)

Introduction

I studied German and French in Oxford at Magdalen College, where I also began my graduate work on the underground poetry of the former East Germany before getting a two-year fellowship from the FvS Foundation to Germany. I returned to a Fellowship in German at Emmanuel College in Cambridge (1990) but came over to Oxford to a Fellowship at New College in 1993. I was there, as a Tutorial fellow, for almost 30 years, from 2008 as Professor of Modern German Literature before joining Queen’s as the Schwarz-Taylor Chair in October 2022.  

Teaching

I have for a long time taught across the modern German syllabus with a special interest in poetry and the contemporary. My focus will now be graduate teaching: for those with an interest in modern or contemporary literature, East German literature, the Berlin Republic, poetry, translation, spectres, angels, ecology, Brecht and Rilke.

Research

I started my academic life researching the samizdat poetry, art and music scene that existed in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.  I have continued my interest in the GDR and have published widely on modern German culture, especially of the post-1945 and contemporary periods; my interests range from poetry and the poetic tradition to modernity, GDR literature; contemporary German culture, lateness, afterness, women’s writing, angels, spectres, translation, Rilke and Brecht. Since 2014 I have also led the project Mediating Modern Poetry. I am also a prize-winning translator of contemporary German literature, including Evelyn Schlag, Raoul Schrott, Michael Krüger, Durs Grünbein, Volker Braun and Ulrike Almut Sandig. I think of myself very much as a practitioner alongside my academic work and have taught poetry writing and translation and been awarded artist residences in UK and Germany.

Publications

Recent publications include:

Ulrike Almut Sandig, Monsters Like Us, trans. by Karen Leeder (London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2022).

Karen Leeder, ed. (with Lyn Marven), Ulrike Draesner: A Companion (New York, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022).

Volker Braun, Great Fugue, trans. by Karen Leeder and David Constantine (Ripon: Smokestack Books, 2022).

Via Lewandowsky & Durs Grünbein, Intercom: Dialogue, trans. by Karen Leeder (Göttingen: Steidl, 2022).

Introduction

I grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from downtown Manhattan. I completed a BA in Comparative Literature and History of Art and Architecture at Brown University in 2015, followed by an MPhil in European and Comparative Literatures and Cultures at the University of Cambridge in 2016. I spent two years teaching high school history in Connecticut before returning to Cambridge to pursue a PhD in French with funding from the Gates Cambridge Scholarship programme. I joined Queen’s as a Career Development Fellow in French in the autumn of 2022.

Teaching

I teach French Literature, with a focus on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, across the first-year course and FHS. I also teach translation into English.

Research

My research demonstrates a preoccupation with the relationship between communication and power in early modern French literature. My doctoral thesis explores Michel de Montaigne’s conception in the Essais of the mechanics of communication, as well as the ways communication influences and is influenced by social and political structures. Adopting a theoretical approach rooted in pragmatic language philosophy, with a particular focus on relevance theory’s cognitively-inflected account of utterance interpretation, the thesis examines Montaigne’s portrayals of communication in four contexts: conversation and civility, diplomacy, jurisprudence, and prayer and exegesis. The sustained use of a pragmatic framework to analyse Montaigne’s evocations of seemingly disparate communicative domains, typically treated separately by intellectual history, reveals patterns in his thinking that traverse these domains.

My next project, provisionally entitled ‘“Ces mots semblent être des charmes”: Speech, Authority, and Force in the Tragedies of Corneille and Racine’, explores the instrumentality of authoritative speech in seventeenth-century French tragedy. Homing in on the speech of monarchs and oracles in particular, it considers how these figures take advantage of, or circumvent, communicative conventions to influence and construct social and political realities. A pragmatics-oriented analysis of forceful speech offers a new means of comparing and contrasting the canonical works of Corneille and Racine. The project also incorporates works by their contemporaries, including Catherine Bernard and Jean Rotrou, to offer an analysis of how monarchical and oracular speech operate in the broader realm of seventeenth-century theatrical theory and practice.

Publications

‘A Message from the Margins: The Role of the Infante in Corneille’s Le Cid’, French Studies, Volume 74, Issue 4(2020), 519-535. https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knaa166.

 ‘Words, Meaning and Force: The Placebo Effect in Montaigne’s Essais and Vair’s Des Charmes’, Montaigne Studies 29 (2017), 213-224.

 ‘“Le plus fructueux et naturel exercise de nostre esprit”: Conversation et domaine public dans les œuvres de Montaigne, Guazzo, et Castiglione’, Bulletin de la Societé internationale des amis de Montaigne, 73 (2021), 199-212.

Course

  • BA (Hons) Modern Languages
  • BA (Hons) Modern Languages and Linguistics
  • BA (Hons) English and Modern Languages
  • BA (Hons) History and Modern Languages
  • BA (Hons) Classics and Modern Languages
  • BA (Hons) Philosophy and Modern Languages
  • BA (Hons) European and Middle Eastern Languages

The College has a particularly strong and lively tradition in these subjects and normally admits about 13 students per year for the courses involving Modern Languages. We welcome applications for all languages taught at Oxford and for all subject combinations.

Queen’s is also the home of the Schwarz-Taylor Chair in German, currently held by Professor Karen Leeder. 

The courses

The majority of Modern Languages students take two languages, but it is also common to study just one: either in any of the six Joint Schools (Modern Languages and Linguistics, English and Modern Languages, History and Modern Languages, Classics and Modern Languages, Philosophy and Modern Languages, European and Middle Eastern Languages), or on its own. The four languages available for ‘sole’ study are French, German, Spanish and Russian, and for these languages there are specially designed courses which provide introductions to subjects such as film, literary theory, medieval studies and philosophy alongside the normal first-year course. It is also possible to take a language you have not previously studied. This can be done for any of Czech, German, Modern Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Russian, but you may only take such a beginners’ course either in one of the Joint Schools or together with a language you have studied to A-level or equivalent.

We welcome applications for all languages taught at Oxford and for all subject combinations, the only restriction being that applicants for Joint Schools (Classics, English, History, Linguistics, or Philosophy) must combine it with one of the languages in which we have a resident Fellow (i.e. French, German, or Spanish). In general, we particularly encourage applications for combinations that involve one or more of these three languages, though that does not mean that candidates interested in other languages should be put off from applying. The College has developed a particular reputation in English and Modern Languages that it is keen to maintain.

The Modern Languages course lasts four years and includes a year abroad, normally taken between the second and third years of study in Oxford (but after the first year for students reading Beginners’ Russian or a Middle Eastern language). Many of our students spend the year as teaching assistants in a school, but it is also possible to attend a foreign university, or to find a work placement. Some placements tend to be handed down from student to student, and there are exchange schemes in place with the University of Salamanca and with the Maximilianeum Stiftung in Munich. The College provides generous grants to assist those wishing to study abroad, or to fund attendance at language courses abroad in some cases.

Teaching

The large number of Tutorial Fellows and Lecturers, together with the native speakers appointed in French and German as Lectors, means that most major aspects of the course, both written and spoken, are taught within the College, though in some areas students will be sent to specialists elsewhere, and some language tuition is provided centrally by the faculty. The tutors in Modern Languages work closely with their colleagues in other subjects to ensure that all combinations function well, whether within Modern Languages or in the Joint Schools.

In the second year all Modern Languages students are involved in a ‘Critical Reading’ seminar which encourages students to make connections across and between their subjects. Otherwise the variety of subjects taught is such that it is rare for any two students to be studying exactly the same permutation and, after working on set texts in the first year, students are encouraged to pursue their own interests for the remainder of the course.

Interviews

As at all colleges, candidates are required to submit one piece of language work for each language they intend to study and are also doing at school, and in addition one piece of written work in English (so a maximum of three pieces in all). In all cases this should normally be regular marked school work. Candidates are also required to sit language tests in their schools in October. The interview itself will include discussion of a short poem or other brief text which will be supplied half-an-hour beforehand. There will be two interviews, normally one for each of the subjects applied for. The discussion of the text will lead on to a general discussion of why the candidate has opted for a predominantly literary course and what literature he or she has read, in any language. We are looking for candidates with a sound grasp of the languages they are offering, a genuine commitment to literary study broadly conceived (and also to the study of Linguistics where appropriate), and an ability to form independent judgements on what they have read either in a foreign language or in English. It is not necessary to have studied literature formally at school. We are seeking above all to assess potential, rather than acquired knowledge.

Languages graduates from The Queen’s College talk about how their studies have enriched their lives and careers.

Teaching

I teach Lusophone Literature from the nineteenth century to the present day, especially Eça de Queirós; Fernando Pessoa; women writers; the literature of Portuguese-speaking Africa.

Research

My research examines Portuguese and Brazilian literature from the nineteenth century to the present day and twentieth century literature from Portuguese-speaking Africa. My 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.

Publications

  • Editor, with Stephen Parkinson, Reading Literature in Portuguese. Commentaries in Honour of Tom Earle, (Oxford: Legenda, 2013)
  • Antigone’s Daughters? Gender, Genealogy, and the Politics of Authorship in Twentieth-Century Portuguese Women’s Writing, with Hilary Owen (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011)
  • Editor, with Stephen Parkinson and T. F. Earle, A Companion to Portuguese Literature, (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2009)
  • Editor, with Claire Williams, Closer to the Wild Heart. Essays on Clarice Lispector, (Oxford: Legenda, 2002)
  • Imagens do Eu na Poesia de Florbela Espanca, (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional- Casa da Moeda, 1997) 
  • Editor, with Glória Fernandes, Women, Literature and Culture in the Portuguese-Speaking World (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996)

At The Queen’s College, I teach first, second and fourth year undergraduates preparing them for their Preliminary examinations (Paper I) and Final Honour School Examinations (Paper I and Paper IIB).

I am also a College Lecturer at Trinity College and St Edmund Hall and a Language Tutor at the University Language Centre.

Introduction

I was born and raised in New York. The Cold War mentality of the 1970s gave Russian civilization a great mystique. I made my first trip to Russia at the end of my school years the very week that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The Iron Curtain had an incredible mystique and also inspired bafflement – if you looked not too far below and behind the surface gloom and deprivation there were fantastic traditions of culture, literature, cinema and art. The noble life-stories of writers who dedicated themselves to truth and art was also highly gripping. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize Lecture which I read as a schoolboy made a monumental impression although my professional interests have now carried me far from his fiction.

I have been visiting professor at Berkeley, Columbia, and the Ecole Normale Superieure, rue d’Ulm, and have given invited lectures at IRLI, St Petersburg, the Anna Akhmatova Museum, St Petersburg; and in recent years at the universities of Cambridge, Columbia, University of Colorado (Boulder), Yale University, and Harvard University. I am a Fellow of the British Academy.

Research

My research falls into four areas: 

The Russian Enlightenment in its comparative European context

I am the author of a number of studies, a major translation, a monograph and editor of a forthcoming book that aim to revise our understanding of the modernization and secularization of Russian culture in the 18th century through the transmission of fundamental ideas of the Western European and British Enlightenment to Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great.  My skill set includes an excellent knowledge of French and English literature and thought in the period, history of science, and classical literature and its reception in this period.  I also have a very good knowledge of institutional history of the Russian Enlightenment and its Academies and an excellent knowledge of rare printed sources (often pursued in rare book libraries all over the world). Without this learning I could not ask the questions that I think are important to the subject and of interest to me.  On this basis I have pursued questions about the impact of science on literature, the image of the nobleman, the figure of the Enlightened despot, the key area of translation, and the capacity of literature to raise philosophical consciousness have all sought to reveal the quality and type of engagement with ideas that transformed Russian elite culture and thought.  The edition of Montesquieu’s masterpiece The Persian Letters published by OUP in its trade series is actually quite a scholarly production, and gave me a chance to pursue some questions outside the Russian context and for a larger audience.

For the past several years I have had an excellent collaboration with Dr Kelsey Rubin-Detlev, currently Foote Junior Research Fellow, The Queen’s College, Oxford, and from January 2018 Assistant Professor at USC, Los Angeles. We have produced a pilot database of the correspondence of Catherine the Great, called CatCor, to be launched in summer 2018. The databse has attacted support from the British Academy/Leverhulme Foundation and the John Fell Fund.  For two years we ran a highly successful international TORCH Network called Enlightenment Correspondences: http://torch.ox.ac.uk/enlightenmentcorr. 

The work of Alexander Pushkin

Much of my research has been on the work of Russia’s most famous writer, Alexander Pushkin.  I am the author of a monograph on Pushkin’s most important narrative poem the Bronze Horseman.  My book on Pushkin’s lyric poetry that aims fundamentally to revise the notion that his poetic genius was effortless, naïve, all style and no intellectual content.  It aims to lay bare just how his engagement with key concepts about the body and soul, the imagination, Nature—many of them part of the Enlightenment legacy in which he was so well read—informs his writing at a far more profound level than interpretations have allowed.   The book made it onto the cover of the Times Literary Supplement has been well received in many scholar journals and provoked considerable argument and disagreement, which is good too.  I edited the Cambridge Companion to Pushkin, which contains much new research by a distinguished group of scholars, and continue to write articles about Pushkin.

Russian poetry:  the traditions

Outside the above areas of concentrations I have produced a steady stream of articles on major poets of the 20th century. I suppose it was on that basis that I was commissioned to write the new chapter entry on Russian poetry for the new Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, which is probably the reference Bible for scholars in all literatures who work on poetry.  The common denominator of these items of research is that they explore the connection between poetry and aesthetic and political movements of the period.  I am at the beginning of a new generation of projects, and continue to believe that much of what I am doing has a revisionist value because I look at new material and also at familiar material in a new light and in a much deeper context than has been customary.  One example of this would be the work I am currently doing on Osip Mandelshtam, for many the greatest Russian poet of the 20th century, whose poems of the 1930s have been overlooked as too difficult and puzzling.  The entire book as I write is aimed at dismantling an ossified critical method that simply doesn’t work for the subject.  Potentially these arguments can radically change scholarly views on his development and genius.  One reviewer of Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence said that the book had a lot to teach people who work on poetry in general.  I’d like to think that this new project, which is one among several, might offer some new thoughts on how to understand difficulty of the linguistic and representative kind that we find in modern poetry.

Russian Literary History

As co-author of a major substantial new History of Russian Literature, as well as articles on individual writers and their relationship to the literary canon, I have devoted much time to thinking about the whole question of national literary traditions and national identity–and perhaps surprisingly to the openness of Russian literature from the medieval period to the twentieth century.

Publications

Please visit my department webpage.

Teaching

C19th to contemporary Italian history, literature and cinema.

Graduate Teaching: MSt in Medieval and Modern Languages. MSt in Film Aesthetics

Research

20th century Italian culture: I am particularly interested in the relationship between political history and narrative. I recently worked on censorship during the Fascist regime and on immigration in contemporary Italian cinema; I am currently working on the reciprocal influence of Italian and US culture.

A video of Guido discussing his research in modern Italian culture is available at:

http://www.ox.ac.uk/research/humanities/humanities_video.html

Publications

Books:

  • Mussolini censore: Storie di letteratura, dissenso e ipocrisie (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2013)
  • Vita e omicidio di Gaetano Pilati: 1881-1925 (Florence, Cesati, 2010)
  • Elio Vittorini: Letteratura in tensione (Florence, Cesati, 2008)
  • Censorship and Literature in Fascist Italy (Toronto University Press, 2007) –  American  Association of Italian Studies Book Prize for 2007
  • Kaos: Luigi Pirandello e i fratelli Taviani (Palermo, L’Epos, 2007)
  • Elio Vittorini: The Writer and the Written (Leeds, Northern Universities Press, 2000)
  • Il mondo scritto: Forme e ideologia nella narrativa di Italo Calvino (Turin, Tirrenia, 1995)

Edited books:

  • With Emma Bond and Federico Faloppa, Destination Italy: Representing Migration in Contemporary Media and Narrative (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2015)
  • With Martin McLaughlin and Franca Pellegrini, Sinergie narrative: Cinema e letteratura nell’Italia contemporanea (Florence, Cesati, 2008)
  • With Robert Gordon, Culture, Censorship and the State in 20th Century Italy (Oxford, Legenda, 2005)

Contact

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