Intellectual and Cultural History | Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics

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A-F | G-M | N-S | T-Z

A-F


	Ayres-Bennett, Wendy (Emerita) Wendy's research interests are: History of the French language; Variation and change in French, from the sixteenth century to the present day; History of linguistic thought; Linguistic standardisation and codification; Language policy and ideology
	Azérad, Dr Hugues Hugues Azérad specialises in comparative literature and aesthetics (Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Bonnefoy, Glissant, Nerval, Benjamin, Adorno, Rancière), postcolonial literature, modernisms, utopia, film, French literature/poetry from 19th century to the present and links between Language learning and cultural studies.
	Berman, Anna A Nineteenth-century novels, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, kinship, family history, siblings, incest, the family novel, science and literature, operatic adaptations of literary classics, nineteenth-century Russian women prose writers (esp. Khvoshchinskaya sisters, Tur).
	Bill, Stanley Stanley Bill works on twentieth-century Polish literature and culture, and on contemporary political discourse in Poland. He has particular interests in populist discourse, postcolonial interpretations of Polish cultural and political history, the poetics of the body, religion and secularization, and Polish-Ukrainian relations. He has written on the current Polish government's approach to civil society; monism and pluralism in Polish politics (with Ben Stanley); postcolonial theory in the Polish context; legacies of Polish Romanticism; and the works of Czesław Miłosz, Bruno Schulz, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
	Birch, Edmund Edmund Birch works on nineteenth-century French literature. His research interests focus on the novel, the history of journalism, nineteenth-century politics and popular culture, and his work draws on a range of authors including Balzac, the brothers Goncourt and Maupassant.
	Cacho, Rodrigo Rodrigo’s research focuses on Renaissance and Baroque cultures and Spanish American colonial literature. His scholarship has been concerned with literary genres such as burlesque and epic poetry, and the works of Francisco de Quevedo. It also treats aspects related to the transmission of culture in the early modern period, including interdisciplinary approaches such as theory of painting and the art of memory. The relationship between art and literature is another area of his research, with a particular interest in painters such as Diego Velázquez and Juan de Valdés Leal. He also works on colonial poetry, especially on the emergence of literary communities in the New World.
	Conde, Maite Maite Conde’s research focuses on Brazilian culture, with a particular emphasis on cinema. Specifically, her work has engaged with questions concerning the relationship between cinema, literature and modernity in Brazil. This has involved a sustained examination of theoretical debates regarding the productive dialogue between film and literary modernism in the early 1900s, and discussions concerning cinema and modernity in Brazil’s First Republic.
	Crowley, Martin Martin's research interests encompass Modern and contemporary cultures of the French-speaking world; Twentieth- and twenty-first-century French philosophy; Critical theory; Ethics and fiction; Ecocriticism; Testimony; Sexuality, embodiment, and representation; Ontologies of coexistence; Intersections of the aesthetic, the philosophical, and the political.
	Feile Tomes, Maya Maya's research revolves around the literary culture of the early modern Iberian world, focusing on transatlantic dialogues, multilingual dynamics (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Latin), and classical reception; she also has a special interest in translation.
	Franklin-Brown, Mary Mary Franklin-Brown studies medieval writing in French, Occitan, Latin, and Catalan. She interprets these texts though the dual lenses of medieval philosophy and current critical thought, and she also takes account of the material transmission of texts through performance or manuscript copy. Her Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing of the Scholastic Age (University of Chicago Press, 2012), a Foucauldian archaeology of medieval encyclopaedias, received the Harry Levin Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association.

G-M


	Gilby, Prof. Emma Emma Gilby works on literary and intellectual history, especially within the early modern period. Much of her research has focused on poetic theory and its connections to the rhetoric, philosophy and theology of seventeenth-century France.
	Gordon, Robert S C Robert Gordon works on the literature, cinema and cultural history of modern Italy. He is the author or editor of 14 books, including a major study of the writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (Pasolini. Forms of Subjectivity) and several books on the work of Primo Levi (e.g. Primo Levi's Ordinary Virtues, Auschwitz Report, The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, Innesti).
	Haywood, Louise M Louise Haywood's research interests lie in medieval Iberian literature and culture. Current work is on authority, truancy and humour in fourteenth-century Iberian culture and the poetics of vision and scholastic psychology in fifteenth-century literary culture. Other interests include the representation (modern and medieval) of the three faiths of medieval Iberia and feminist approaches to medieval culture.
	James, Ian Ian's research interests are: Recent and contemporary French philosophy; The interplay of philosophy and literature in twentieth- and twenty-first-century French writing; The relation of the arts to the sciences; Literary and visual aesthetics; Spatial theory and representations of spatiality in literature.
	Kogut Lessa de Sá, Vivien Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá is interested in comparative studies in Brazilian, Portuguese and English literatures, early colonial Brazil and early modern travel writing. Her research explores sixteenth-century cultural exchanges between Europe and the New World, with a focus on interactions between England, Portugal and Brazil.
	Moriarty, Prof. Michael (Emeritus) Research interests: History of French thought, 16th to 18th centuries, especially Descartes and Pascal; Seventeenth-century French literature.

N-S


	O'Bryen, Rory Rory's current research explores the representation of the Magdalena River in Colombian culture between 1850 and the present day. It engages with a range of works, including mid-nineteenth-century regional romances, late nineteenth-century Afro-Colombian poetry, representations of leprosy in early twentieth-century literature, music and silent film, the ‘novela de la Violencia’ of the 1950s, and late twentieth-century engagements with narcotráfico. In doing so it uses the river as a conduit into the fragile interplay between nation-formation and global political and economic processes.
	Reich, Rebecca Twentieth-century Russian literature, film, music and popular culture; literary politics; intellectual and cultural history; the history of science and medicine, particularly psychiatry; samizdat and dissent; journalism and print culture; literary theory; law and humanities.
	Rohner, Stephanie Stephanie's research interests are: Colonial Latin American literature and culture; Race and indigeneity in the viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain; Pre-Columbian material culture; Censorship and textual transmission; Jesuit historiography
	Ruehl, Dr Martin Dr Ruehl specializes in the intellectual history of modern Germany. His research to date has focused on the ideas and ideologies that shaped German society and culture from Bismarck to Hitler, in particular the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and its reception since the 1890s. He has published books and articles on Nietzsche, Burckhardt, Thomas Mann, Ernst Kantorowicz, German historicism and grecophilia. His monograph The Italian Renaissance and the German Historical Imagination, 1860-1930 (Cambridge 2015) was shortlisted for the Gladstone History Book Prize of the Royal Historical Society. The recipient of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, Dr Ruehl is currently writing a book on German ideas of Europe before World War I.
	Sugden, Dr. Rebecca Rebecca specialises in nineteenth-century French literature, with a particular interest in the relationship between the novel and the political history of the period. More broadly, she maintains research interests in literary theory, cultural history, and the history of French thought.

T-Z


	Webber, Andrew J. Andrew J. Webber is Professor of Modern German and Comparative Culture. He has research and teaching interests in a wide range of German and comparative film, from the 1920s to the present day. A particular concern of his work is how film relates to psychoanalysis, the Gothic imagination, constructions of gender and sexuality, and the urban, and he has published essays on combinations of all of these.
	White, Dr Claire Claire specialises in nineteenth-century French literature and art, with a particular interest in class, labour politics, aesthetics, and intellectual history.
	Widdis, Emma In broad terms, Professor Widdis is interested in the relationship between culture and ideology in the early Soviet period. Her research focuses in particular on Russian and Soviet cinema before 1953, and she also works extensively on visual culture, architecture and design, and popular science.
	Woodford, Dr Charlotte Charlotte's research interests are: German women’s writing, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; History of gender and sexuality; Lou Andreas-Salomé