Fine Art

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

Dr Rachel Wells is a Senior Ruskin Tutor in the History and Theory of Fine Art. She has been an invited speaker at the Universities of Durham, Edinburgh, Milan, Newcastle, Oxford, Sunderland, the Courtauld Institute of Art, London and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich. She has given invited talks and tours at galleries and museums including the Ashmolean, Baltic, the Hayward Gallery, the Laing Art Gallery, Modern Art Oxford, the Photographers’ Gallery and Tate Britain. 

Rachel was Lecturer in the History and Theory of Art at Newcastle University (2011-2018), Tutor in Fine Art (History and Theory) at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford (2009-2011), and Henry Moore Foundation Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art (2008-9). She received her PhD (2008) and MA (2004) from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London University. Prior to her study in the History of Art, Rachel read English at Cambridge University (BA 2003). She is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and has acted as an External Examiner at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester.

In 2023-24 Rachel is teaching the BFA1 course ‘Contemporary Art History and Theory: An Introduction’ with Professor Jason Gaiger, the BFA2 course ‘Distance and Distraction’ with Professor Anthony Gardner, the BFA1 course ‘Contemporary Art and the Monument: (Re)Constructing History’, and she is a tutor for the BFA3 Extended Essay. Rachel is a Retained Lecturer at Worcester College.

Rachel’s research focuses on modern and contemporary art, with particular interest in issues of scale and distance and their relation to conflict and memorialisation. Recent publications have focused on the use of scale and distance in art and questions of interpretation, loss and the construction of histories. Rachel’s writing has been published by Tate, Art History and the Oxford Art Journal, among others, and her book Scale in Contemporary Sculpture (Ashgate, 2013) was released in paperback by Routledge in 2016. The book offers a theorised account of scale in contemporary sculpture and its photographic documentation within the interlinked contexts of accelerated global capitalism and the legacies of postmodern theory. Most recently, she has contributed to the book Escala: Escultura 1945-2000 (Fundación Juan March, 2023).