Professor Nicholas Hammond

  • Professor of Early Modern French Literature and Culture
Professor Nicholas Hammond

Contact

Location

  • Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 9DA

About

Nicholas Hammond specialises in seventeenth-century French thought, drama, poetry and culture.

He is the author of Playing with truth: language and the human condition in Pascal's Pensées (OUP, 1994); Creative Tensions: an introduction to seventeenth-century French Literature (Duckworth, 1997);  Fragmentary Voices: memory and education at Port-Royal (Biblio 17, 2004); and Gossip, Sexuality and Scandal in France (1610-1715) (Peter Lang, 2011). He is also the editor of D'Aubignac's Quatre Dissertations contre Corneille (1996); the Cambridge Companion to Pascal (2003); and of the Duckworth series New Readings: introductions to European literature and culture. He is co-editor, with Bill Burgwinkle and Emma Wilson, of The Cambridge History of French Literature (2011), and, with Michael Moriarty, of Evocations of Eloquence: Rhetoric, Literature and Religion in early modern France (Peter Lang, 2012). He produced also a scholarly edition of the complete poetry of Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin (Classiques Garnier, 2012). His most recent books are Racine's Andromaque: absences and displacements, co-edited with Joseph Harris (Brill, 2019), a monograph, The Powers of Sound and Song in Early Modern Paris (Penn State University Press, 2019), and, co-edited with Paul Hammond, Racine’s Roman Tragedies: essays on “Britannicus” and “Bérénice” (Brill, 2022).

He is the director of a project on 17th-century Parisian soundscapes, and the project's website, www.parisiansoundscapes.org, is devoted to transcriptions and performances of street songs.

Professor Hammond welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students with research interests relevant to his interests.

Research

Research interests: 

  • Early modern cultural history (song cultures, sound studies)
  • Thought (especially Pascal and Port-Royal) 
  • Theatre (especially 17th-century playwrights Racine, Corneille, Molière)
  • Gender and sexuality studies, poetry, prose (especially women writers Sévigné and Lafayette)

 

Recent research projects: 

Sound in theatre, the theatre of Jean Racine, Gossip, sound worlds (see www.parisiansoundscapes.org), libertin poetry.

Published works: 

 

Books

Playing with Truth: language and the human condition in Pascal's Pensées (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994)

D'Aubignac, Dissertations contre Corneille, introduction and notes, edited with Michael Hawcroft, Exeter French Texts, (Exeter, 1995)

Creative Tensions: an introduction to seventeenth-century French literature (London: Duckworth, 1997)

The Cambridge Companion to Pascal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), editor, author of introduction (pp.1-3) and chapter on ‘Pascal’s Pensées and the art of persuasion’ (pp.235-252)

Fragmentary Voices: memory and education at Port-Royal (Tübingen: Biblio 17, 2004)

The Cambridge History of French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), as co-editor, co-author of introduction, pp.1-10, and author of chapter on ‘Seventeenth-Century Margins’, pp.343-9.

Gossip, Sexuality and Scandal in France (1610-1715) (Oxford-Bern: Peter Lang, 2011)

Evocations of Eloquence: Rhetoric, Literature and Religion in early-modern France (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), as co-editor, co-author of introduction, pp. 1-5, and author of chapter, ‘The Child’s Voice’, pp. 163-174.

Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin, Poésies (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012), as editor, and author of introduction (50 pages).

Soundscapes, special number of Early Modern French Studies, edited with Tom Hamilton (June, 2019)

Racine’s “Andromaque”: absences and displacements, edited with Joseph Harris (Brill, 2019)

The Powers of Sound and Song in Early Modern Paris (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2019)

Racine’s Roman Tragedies: essays on “Britannicus” and “Bérénice”, edited with Paul Hammond (Brill, 2022)


 

Teaching and supervision

Teaching interests: 

Early Modern literature and thought, Theatre (17th century to the present), papers FR4, FR9, FR14