(Trans)forming Knowledge

Our research examines and applies new and emerging ways of understanding, communicating, and disseminating knowledge from the medieval period, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the present day.

As such, we are often concerned with questions of communicative method and cultural translation; but we come to these questions from a rich variety of specialisms and disciplinary backgrounds. We aim to foster a research environment in which serious intellectual inquiry into knowledge in its multifarious forms is conducted in an open, collaborative, mutually supportive and genuinely cross-disciplinary way.

Stream leads: Nigel Harris and Andrew Watts

Researchers

• Helen Abbott specialises in nineteenth-century French poetry and music. Her research explores ways of writing about word-music relationships in poetic language, in critical theories, and using digital methodologies.
• Caroline Ardrey specialises in nineteenth-century French poetry and its interaction with other art forms and media, in particular music and fashion.
• Paolo De Ventura looks at early Italian literature and the historical evolution of the Italian language.
• Elystan Griffiths researches social and political writing of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, women’s writing and the pastoral.
• Nigel Harris focuses on three sometimes related interests: allegorical and symbolic uses of animals in medieval literature; late medieval didactic literature (in Latin and German), and its methods of conveying religious and ethical ideas to an increasingly wide audience
• Sara Jones explores the ways in which first-person testimony is mediated across different cultural forms to political effect. She is also working on a project exploring how knowledge about the secret police was produced and circulated in the former East Germany.
• Nicholas Martin researches modern intellectual history, in particular the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and their reception, as well as the cultural history of war, terrorism and political violence in twentieth-century Germany.
• Isobel Palmer focuses on twentieth-century poetry and literary theory, with an emphasis on Russian modernist poetry and Russian Formalism. Her current research draws on theories of the lyric, old/new media, and the urban environment to place questions of literary form in the dynamic contexts of the modernizing city and the 1905 and 1917 revolutions.
• Emma Wagstaff looks at French poetry, and the relationship between literature and the visual arts, both underpinned by investigation of literary forms and their relationship to time.
• Aengus Ward works in the fields of medieval Spanish history and historiography and digital textual editing.
• Andrew Watts is a specialist in nineteenth-century French prose fiction, especially the work of Honoré de Balzac. His current research focuses on adaptations of classic novels from this period in a variety of different media including silent film, graphic novels, and stage musicals.

Major publications

• Abbott, H. 2017, Baudelaire in Song 1880–1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Griffiths, E. 2020, The Shepherd, the Volk, and the Middle Class: Transformations of Pastoral in German-Language Writing, 1750-1850. Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer.
• Harris, N. 2020, The Thirteenth-Century Animal Turn: Medieval and Twenty-First-Century Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Jones, S. 2014, The Media of Testimony: Remembering the East German Stasi in the Berlin Republic.Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Wagstaff, E. 2020, André du Bouchet: Poetic Forms of Attention. Leiden: Brill.
• Ward, A. 2017, Estoria de Espanna Digital: A Digital Critical Edition of the Estoria de Espanna de Alfonso X el Sabio. University of Birmingham.
• Griffiths, K. and Watts, A. 2020, The History of French Literature on Film. New York: Bloomsbury.

Projects

• Helen Abbott and Caroline Ardrey’s AHRC-funded Baudelaire Song Project
• Nigel Harris’s Leverhulme-funded The Correspondence of Zwingli and Oecolampadius
• Sara Jones’s work as CI on the AHRC-funded Knowing the Secret Police and as PI on the AHRC-funded network Culture and its Uses as Testimony
• Aengus Ward’s AHRC-funded Estoria de Espanna Digital and the related Transcribe Estoria

Distinguished visiting speakers

Our deliberations are informed and enriched by relevant contributions from a range of distinguished guest speakers. Recent seminars and discussions have focused on questions of cognition (Terence Cave), the digital Humanities (Julianne Nyhan, Emma Cayley), Relevance Theory (Deirdre Wilson), philology (John T. Hamilton) and the relationship between adaptation and theory (Kamilla Elliott). The Stream has also established links with creative practitioners, for example hosting an event with BBC radio dramatist Adrian Penketh.

Doctoral researchers

• Ivor Bolton, The Implementation of German Heritage Policy and the Representation of "Inner Unity" through Memorials and Museums
• Maria Del Buono, An inter-medial dialogue between cinema and its posters Italy 1945-1979.
• Giacomo Danielli, The Artistic Production of the Movimento del 77 in Bologna.
• George Gibson, Letters without signatures: An analysis of the anonymous letters written by citizens of the German Democratic Republic to the BBC German Service circa the construction of the Berlin Wall, 1960-1962
• Benoit Guérillot, Proust, Bonnard, and Deleuze’s Theory of Signs
• Imran Hashmi, Adorno and Nietzsche as critics of culture
• Matthew Hines, Writing a New Society: ‘Aufbau’ in East German Literature 1945-1955
• Livia Manzini, The role of correct pronunciation and intonation in teaching Italian as a foreign language through blended learning: a guide to the core sounds of the Italian language for English native speakers
• Erica Preti, Dante in Arabic: Analysis of the translations and adaptations of the Divine Comedy in the Arabic world
• Simona Scanni, Effectiveness of online language learning: a case study of Italian as a foreign language
• Panagiota Vogiatzi, Representations of Queer Women in French and Greek Literature (1880-1940). A Comparative Reading.