Dr Jennifer Oliver

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)