Dr Jennifer Oliver
My research is centred on sixteenth-century French literature, culture, and thought, and I teach across the early modern period and beyond. My first book (see below) examined the importance of shipwreck as a dynamic and spectacular motif in writing of the sixteenth-century in France. In my current research I am interested in how early modern French writers (including Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, and d’Aubigné, but also technical writers like the architect Philibert de l’Orme) contemplated the connections and tensions between poetics, technology, and the natural environment.
My broader research interests include the intersections between literary studies and the history of science, medicine, and technology; art and architectural history; nonhuman and eco-critical theory; and metaphor theory. I co-run, with Marie Thébaud-Sorger (CNRS/Maison Française d’Oxford), a series of interdisciplinary and international early modern workshops and study days on ‘Writing Technology/The Technology of Writing’.
