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.

Charlotte Ross has a BA (Honours) in Italian and English from Newnham College, Cambridge, an MSt. in Italian Studies from Balliol College, Oxford, and a PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Warwick. Before joining the Faculty of Modern Languages at Oxford, she was Reader in Sexuality, Gender and Cultural Studies in the Department of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham. She has held visiting professorships at the University of Palermo (2015) and the University of Toronto (Goggio Visiting Professor, 2023).

Charlotte teaches on a range of topics across 19th, 20th and 21st century Italian literature and culture. She is interested in hearing from graduate students who would like to work on questions of gender and sexuality in these periods, including those whose proposed projects are interdisciplinary in nature.

Charlotte’s research analyses cultural discourses of gender, sexuality and embodiment; the ways in which our gendered, sexed and sexual selves are constructed, narrated, represented, and de/re-constructed through counter-hegemonic discourses and practices. She has focused on LGBTQ+ individuals, communities, cultures and practices, predominantly in Italian culture, from the 19th century to the present day. Recently, she has begun to work more comparatively, tracing cross-cultural dialogues and resonances between Italian, French and British texts, for example. Her work is interdisciplinary, ranging across literary study, critical approaches to cultural discourses more broadly, including film and media, and ethnographic analysis of lived experience. She is the author of two monographs, co-editor of several edited collections of essays and her articles have been published in leading international peer-reviewed journals, such as Italian Studies, Italian Culture, Modern Language Review, Modern Italy. Her work has been funded by grants from the British Academy, the AHRC and the Leverhulme Trust. She is currently Senior Co-Editor of the journal Italian Studies.

See full publications list on faculty website

I studied Comparative Literature in Vienna and completed a teacher training programme in Russian and German. My studies have led me to the Aristotle University in Greece and to the two Russian Novgorods. During my studies I worked as a secondary school teacher and librarian.

As a Fulbright Teaching Assistant in Atlanta, I began teaching at university level. I first came to the UK to join the University of Kent, followed by three years at King’s College London, during which I completed an internship at the Austrian Embassy to Moldova and obtained a postgraduate diploma for German Language Teaching in International Higher Education.

I teach German to undergraduate students and bring with me a focus on the Austrian approaches to life and culture.

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

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.