Modern Languages & joint degrees

Benjamin 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, McEwan). His current book project engages critically with the work of the Frankfurt School during the 1930s and 1940s to elaborate a model of socially committed, reflexive interdisciplinarity for the 21st century.

Benjamin is also the Modern Languages Coordinator for Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation.

German language and literature: special interests in German intellectual history; German film; the cross-over between the cognitive sciences and phenomenology

I supervise graduate work on the cultural history of the German speaking world from the late 19th century to the present: literature, philosophy, film and other cultural institutions in a cultural context.

DPhil topics supervised to date: German film 1930-1950; Heidegger and French post-structuralism; Heidegger and Nietzsche; the ‘Neues Museum’ as a new paradigm of cultural memory; the everyday in Berlin and Vienna circa 1900; Journal Culture in the Weimar Republic; Agency in the films of Petzold, Akın, Tykwer; Genre in contemporary German narrative film, esp. Dominik Graf; The poetry of Thomas Kling in the context of BRD in the 1970s and 1980s; a comparative approach to the work of Thomas Bernhard; the international high and pop cultural reception of Thomas Mann’s ‘Zauberberg’; Embodied cognition in German modernism; the metaphor of ‘games’ in Wittgenstein and Hermann Hesse; Gerda Walther’s phenomenology in the context of German modernism; Walter Benjamin and Calderon; Wittgenstein, creativity and AI.

I have a longstanding commitment to and strong track record in widening participation in higher education. I was myself educated at a comprehensive school in South London and went from there to Cambridge, where I did a BA in French and German, including a year at the Université Paul Valéry in Montpellier. I did a PhD in French at Cambridge, and held a Kennedy Fellowship at Harvard from 1995-96. I am always delighted to receive UCAS applications from sixth-formers from non-selective state schools and colleges.

I teach undergraduates in lectures, seminars and tutorials, in both English and French, introducing them to a wide variety of texts and topics in French literature and culture from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. I also teach translation into English.

I welcome applications from students wishing to study any aspect of French eighteenth-century writing, Enlightenment, Diderot, materialism, aesthetics. Doctoral students of mine have worked or are working on subjects as diverse as religious toleration and Bayle, Diderot and Lessing, biography and Ovid, eighteenth-century theories and practices of education, gender and sexuality in Rabelais and his reception, the history of plagiarism. I coordinate the early modern graduate exchange with the department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University, and the FribOx programme, which runs an annual conference with the Université de Fribourg (Switzerland).

My research expertise is in the literary history of the French eighteenth century,  in particular the works of the philosophe, Diderot. I’m interested in literary materiality, the act of publication, practices of anonymity and pseudonymity, querelles, and in questions of contextualisation. I am currently trying to find time to write about the publication of the attentat on Louis XV, and to finish a material history of Diderot’s Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre.

I am currently the General Editor of the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. I was the first Academic Programme Director for the Voltaire Foundation’s Besterman Centre for the Enlightenment, and co-steered the ANR-funded research collective, AGON. La dispute: cas, controverses et querelles à l’âge classique (Oxford-Paris-IV). I’m also a member of a number of international research groups, including the Groupe de Recherche Interdisciplinaire de l’Histoire du Littéraire (EHESS-Paris III).

Translation is an important part of my academic practice. I have translated or co-translated three works by Diderot: Letter on the Blind, Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown (with Katie Scott), and Rameau’s Nephew (with Caroline Warman). The latter, a free-access, multi-media edition, won the 2015 British Society for 18thc Studies Prize for digital resources. I have also translated the short story by Daudet, Mr Segwin’s Goat (in Littéraire).

I’m the author of Blindness and Enlightenment (2011), the editor of Self-Evident Truths? Human Rights and the Enlightenment (2012), and the co-editor of a number of collections of essays, including Naming, Renaming, and Un-Naming in Early Modern Europe (2013) and Women and Quarrels in Early Modern France (2022).

View all publications on the Faculty of Medieval & Modern Languages website

My main research interests lie in the fields of corpus linguistics, contrastive linguistics (French-English), phraseology, Construction Grammar and language attitudes. I am particularly interested in linguistic phenomena at the interface between lexis and grammar, and my doctoral thesis, which was a corpus-based investigation of determination in certain French and English prepositional phrases, drew on insights from recent phraseological and constructional work in order to shed light on a problem that had, until then, primarily been treated as purely grammatical. I am also interested in the semantics of prepositions and adverbials, and in discourse markers and connectives. I am currently working on my first book project, which expands on the findings of my doctoral research. My next research projects focus on foreign language teaching (phraseodidactics) and computer-mediated communication (prescriptivism in online interactions).

I teach undergraduates at Worcester College (French grammar ; translation into French ; French essay ; oral practice ; listening comprehension). I have previously taught linguistics and English at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne, and French at the University of Cambridge (MML faculty, Selwyn College and Homerton College).

I am Professor of Spanish American and Comparative Literature in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and a Tutorial Fellow at Trinity College. My current research focuses on the emergence of popular science writing in Spanish American periodicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I grew up in Puerto Rico and studied in the USA, going on to hold permanent posts in Aberystwyth University and University College London before moving to Trinity in 2012.

I tutor undergraduates on the Spanish first-year course, and on the second- and final-year Modern Spanish-American paper (Paper VIII), Spanish-American authors (Paper XI), and Spanish-American Optional papers (Papers XII). I also offer translation classes.

At the Faculty of Medieval & Modern Languages, I lecture to undergraduates on a range of topics relating to Spanish-American literature from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Since my arrival at Oxford, I’ve given lectures on modernismo, the Spanish-American short story, the avant-garde poets (1910s-1930s), women writers, and the Mexican Revolution, among other topics.

At postgraduate level, I offer an option on ‘Haunting in Spanish American Literature’. I have supervised doctoral students working on a range of topics related to Latin American and, more widely, hemispheric American literature and culture, and haunting/the ghostly. I welcome students who are interested in studying topics related to literature and science; spectrality; landscape; intellectual history in Latin America and beyond. I’m very interested in supervising comparative projects that explore transnational literary and intellectual exchanges in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

My first monograph, Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination explored the ways in which different landscapes in the Americas breed different stylizations of ghosts and haunting. I have co-edited, with Esther Peeren (University of Amsterdam), two collections on the topic of ghosts: Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (Continuum, 2010 and The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (Bloomsbury, 2013).

I have written articles and chapters on Mexican fin-de-siècle Spanish American popular science, Spanish American modernismo, global modernisms, spectrality, and Latinx studies. My current book project, entitled Modernist Laboratories: Science and the Poetics of Progress in Fin-de-Siècle Spanish America (under contract with Oxford University Press), explores the growth of science writing in Spanish-American literature from the 1870s to 1930. I have been invited to give talks related to this project across the world.

I was the recipient, in 2017-18, of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, which allowed me to advance the research and writing for the project. Between 2015 and 2017 I was co-investigator, with Joanna Page (Cambridge) of the AHRC-funded Science in Text and Culture in Latin America research network, which brought together scholars working on literature, cinema, cultural studies, film studies, visual art studies and history of art, as well as sociologists and historians interested in the history and philosophy of science.

My path to Russian has been a long and, at times, indirect one. I first became fascinated by Russia at school, when I discovered the music of Shostakovich. Through him, I began to explore Russian literature and, thanks to a wise teacher, began to explore the language. I then headed to Durham University, where I studied not just Russian, but French and German too. For several years, I was torn between which of these languages I would like to specialise in, but a year spent in Krasnoyarsk and Ulyanovsk convinced me Russia was my real passion.

After a DPhil at Oxford on the Soviet writer, Andrei Platonov, I taught at the University of Wales, Bangor, before returning to Oxford to take up a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Wolfson College. Here, I began to combine my expertise in Russian literature with my love of music, and since then, I have written equally about both subjects. I took up my present position in 2007, having previously taught at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, London. I have also been lucky enough to spend time as a fellow of both the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Paris Institute for Advanced Study.

Alongside my academic work, I enjoy sharing my fascination with Russian culture with wide and diverse audiences. I have written essays and given talks for Garsington Opera, Opera Holland Park, the Royal Opera House, Stuttgart Opera, the Vienna State Opera, and Welsh National Opera, and work closely with the Oxford Lieder Festival and Wigmore Hall. I also regularly contribute to the UNIQ course in Modern Languages, as well as Wadham College’s own summer school.

After completing my PhD at the Italian Institute of Human Sciences in Florence and Sapienza University of Rome in 2012, I held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of York (2013), the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main (2014-2015), and the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (2016-2018). Before coming to Oxford as a Career Development Fellow and Tutor in Italian at Christ Church and Associate College Lecturer at Worcester College and St John’s College, I taught comparative literature at Bard College Berlin (2019-2021).

I teach most areas of Italian literature for both Prelims papers and the Final Honours School, from Dante and the Middle Ages to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

My research focuses on the Italian poetic tradition and its modern and contemporary ramifications, but my work extends into other genres and media, as well as theoretical dimensions. Over the years I have written on Dante, Petrarch, Francesca Turini Bufalini, Giacomo Leopardi, Guido Gozzano, Eugenio Montale, and Giorgio Caproni, among several others, also exploring questions of temporality, gender, and performance. My new project on ‘gestural communities’ developed out of my long-term interest in the history and theory of the lyric, which led to my monographs Canzonieri in morte. Per un’etica poetica del lutto (2015) and Il desiderio della lirica. Poesia, creazione, conoscenza (2016), devoted respectively to the ethics of mourning and to creative desire in lyric poetry. In recent years, working at the intersection of literature and theory, I have increasingly begun to scrutinise the ways in which lyric discourse offers the possibility to rethink certain concepts and socio-cultural practices in much broader and transdisciplinary terms. My project starts from the investigation of the transnational and transmedia developments of the lyric in the Italian experimental scene of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in order to explore a different model of community formation and its cultural and political implications.

See all publications on the faculty website

Before starting my DPhil I studied Franco-German studies at the universities of La Sorbonne (Paris IV) and Bonn. I did a Master’s in German and Comparative Literature at the universities of Bonn and St Andrews.

I am now a third year DPhil at Hertford College. My research focuses on women writers of the end of the nineteenth century in France, Germany and Norway. I analyse and compare their work and look at how they respond to Naturalist writing, especially when it comes to the representation of femininity and mental health.

I was also part of the third cohort of Europeaum scholars, a programme aimed at DPhil students interested in European policy. Alongside a group of seven other students from all over Europe, I work on a project aiming at improving democratic participation.

You can listen to a podcast I did on a French woman writer, Georges de Peyrebrune here.

This academic year, I am teaching Paper III and IV in German at Worcester College, and the French Thought seminar for French Sole first-years. I am also Graduate Assistant at Lincoln College.

• ‘“Je est une Autre” : la fragmentation du Moi féminin chez Hedwig Dohm et Gabriele Reuter’. Revue d’Études Françaises, Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest (August 2023)

I work mostly on sixteenth-century French literature, culture, and thought, and I teach across the early modern period and quite widely beyond. In my current book project Mineral Matters: Materials, Making, and Early Modern French Literature, I am interested in how early modern writers and craftspeople contemplated the connections and tensions between poetics, craft/technique, and the natural environment. The book explores mineral nature-cultures in Rabelais, Ronsard, Léry, Montaigne, and d’Aubigné, alongside technical writers like architecte du roi Philibert de l’Orme and the ceramicist Bernard Palissy. I am committed to widening access to the study of languages and literatures; I have given classes and talks on French grammar, Renaissance love poetry, and cinema for a range of schemes at Oxford and beyond, including the UNIQ summer school, and am a former co-organiser of the French Sub-Faculty’s Film Competition for secondary school students.

I teach the whole first-year course in French literature, and sixteenth- and seventeenth- century authors and topics for FHS, as well as French-English translation, including translation theory and early modern translation. I lecture on sixteenth-century Special Authors for Paper X, and on ’(Non)human Bodies in Early Modern French Literature’ and ‘Early Modern Materialisms’ for the early modern period paper (Paper VII), which may also be of interest to Paper X students and students taking the Paper XII ‘New Ecologies’ option. I co-convene the MSt Special Subject on ‘Early Modern Inventions’, and teach a range of critical and theoretical texts, particularly in the field of nonhuman/eco- theory.

My broader research interests include the intersections between literary studies and the history of science, medicine, and technology; art and architectural history; nonhuman and eco-critical theory; and metaphor theory. I co-founded the interdisciplinary and international TORCH Network Writing Technologies with Marie Thébaud-Sorger (CNRS/Maison Française d’Oxford).

• ‘Du navire au livre : La famille des Nefs publiées en France 1497-1507’, Réforme, Humanisme et Renaissance 96.1, 2023, 9-36
• ‘Lithic Montaigne: Stone, “bastiment”, and “Du repentir” (III, 2)’, Montaigne Studies, no. 35 (‘Material Montaigne/ Montaigne Matériel’), 35-48
• ‘« Forgé de son invention » : sur la double biomimesis des Essais II.9 et II. 12’, Bulletin de la Société internationale des amis de Montaigne, ‘Montaigne outre-Manche’, no. 74, 2022 — 1, 149-166
• ‘ “When is a meadow not a meadow?”: Dark Ecology and Fields of Conflict in French Renaissance Poetry’, in Early Modern Écologies, eds. Pauline Goul and Phillip John Usher (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), pp. 73-98
• Shipwreck in French Renaissance Writing: The Direful Spectacle (OUP, 2019)
• ‘Rabelais’s Engins: War Machines, Analogy, and the Anxiety of Invention in the Quart Livre’, Early Modern French Studies (December 2016)

Originally from Western Austria, I studied Translation Studies, Spanish, and French at the University of Vienna. After working as a translator and German teacher for a while, I came to Oxford to teach German language and literature of the German speaking countries to students of all years at New College, St. Hugh’s, St. Anne’s, Worcester, and Lady Margaret Hall preparing them for their Paper I exams (Prelims & FHS). In addition, I teach a seminar on German and Austrian slam poetry for second year students.

My academic interests lie in linguistics, pedagogy, and the design of educational material for blended learning.

I teach Prose (translation into German) to students studying German at St. John’s, Worcester and LMH. And I teach various courses at the Language Centre, such as German beginner classes, academic reading for Archaeologists, Theologians and Historians. Prior to Oxford, I taught German at the Schools of Art, Languages and Cultures at Manchester and later at Bristol University.