English Department - About Us

Publications           Research Projects         Teaching

As Professor for Early Modern Literatures in English, my research and teaching revolve mainly around early modern drama and theatre history, memory culture in Shakespeare’s England, eighteenth-century literature and culture, gender studies and the history of feminism before 1800. I am particularly interested in the ways literary texts are part of the world, then and now: situated in specific historical, political and socio-cultural contexts, result of material conditions as well as cognitive, affective and aesthetic perception habits, in the form of theatrical performances, adaptations, re-writings, as acts of communication that create communities, shape identities, negotiate conflicts and help us understand better our society, past and present. I am therefore particularly delighted to be involved in a research project with the Robinson-Library, a unique archive of about 4’000 historical editions, translations and adaptations of Defoe’s famous novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), a formative text for modernity that continues to influence our ideas about the colonial past as well as today’s globalisation.

I did my graduate studies at LMU Munich, where I was awarded a doctoral degree for a study of masculinity in the eighteenth-century and Romantic novel in 2007. I received the venia legend in 2011 for my postdoctoral research, which explored practices of remembering and forgetting in early modern drama. After substituting as a temporary professor in English Literature at LMU Munich, I was appointed in 2013 as Chair for English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Würzburg, Germany, where I also served as Head of Department (2014-2016) and as Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Arts (2017-2019). Since 2016 I have held research fellowships and visiting professorships at Jawaharlal-Nehru-University and Jamia Millia Islamia, both New Delhi. In August 2019 I took up the professorship in Early Modern Literatures at UZH.

I am lucky to work together with a team of scholars whose research complements, challenges and supports mine: with Beatrice Montedoro I share a keen interest in the material production and reception conditions of early modern plays; Sophie Battell’s focus on migration and hospitality in early modern drama usefully complements mine on the literary history of globalization in the eighteenth-century; Antoinina Bevan Zlatar’s work on the Reformation and seventeenth-century literature intersects with mine on confessional conflict and memory culture; and Anne-Claire Michoux collaborates with me on the research project “The Feminist Enlightenment Across Europe”.