Professor Caroline Warman

Research

I am interested in literature and the circulation of ideas, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am currently looking at Diderot’s Eléments de physiologie in the context of the thinking of his contemporaries on matter, physiology and consciousness. I want ideas and texts to be able to flow between French and English as much as they did in the period I study, and have therefore translated and edited a selection of Isabelle de Charrière’s novellas (Penguin Classics, 2012), and co-translated (with Kate Tunstall) Marian Hobson’s essays on the Enlightenment (SVEC, 2011) and Denis Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau (OpenBook Publishers, 2014; 2nd edition 2016), which you can read for free here here.  I co-ordinated the translation by 102 students and colleagues of Tolerance: The Beacon of the Enlightenment which was published on the first anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations. You can read the book for free here. We also co-organised (with Isabelle Moreau of UCL) a conference on the topic of ‘Thinking Matter’ in May 2012. I am a member of the ANR funded research project on ‘Querelles’ in England and France in the Early Modern Period, see here.

Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

I teach the First Year survey courses from medieval to modern. I lecture on aspects of French eighteenth and nineteenth century literature and thought, including the Novel 1700-1900, the Encyclopédie, Nineteenth Century French Thought, Literature and Philosophy in the Revolution, Women’s Writing, etc. I give tutorials on prescribed authors Voltaire and Diderot, and special subject Rousseau. I teach translation into and out of French.

Graduate Teaching

I welcome applications at either masters or doctoral level relating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially any aspect of thought or cultural history. See the European Enlightenment Programme.

Publications