Wes Williams, M.A. D.Phil.

University Lecturer in French, Fellow of St Edmund Hall

 

Research

Wes Williams' main research interests are in the field of Renaissance and/or early modern literature; he has written a book on pilgrimage writing, and continues to explore travel narratives of various kinds across the period. He is now writing a book on monsters and their meanings from, roughly, Rabelais to Racine (by way of Shakespeare, Montaigne and a few others). He also works on European film, and in the theatre as a writer and director.

Teaching

French language and literature; especially sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; film, especially Fassbinder and Godard; literary theory.

Graduate Teaching

I welcome enquiries about graduate work in all aspects of Renaissance and early modern literature and cultural history. I have also jointly supervised doctorates in film studies, and regularly teach on the Graduate Literary Theory course.

Publications

''Being in the Middle': Translation, Transition and the 'Early Modern'', Paragraph, 29; 1 (2006), 27-39

'''Out of the frying pan ...': Curiosity, danger, and the poetics of witness in the Renaissance traveller’s tale', in: Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, eds. Robert Evans and Alex Marr (Ashgate, 2007)



'D'un ami l’autre: la figure du compagnon chez les pèlerins de Jérusalem', "Le voyage en Europe à la Renaissance" Romanic Review, 94:1-2 (2003), 93-114

'For your eyes only: Corneille’s view of Andromeda', Classical Philology [special number on Ekphrasis], 102; 1 (2007), 110-123

Pilgrimage and Narrative in the French Renaissance: 'The Undiscovered Country' , Clarendon Press (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999)



'Strange Fruit: The Culture of Pilgrimage from Mandeville to the Missionaries', in: Forms of the Medieval in the Renaissance: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of a Cultural Continuum (EMF: Charlottesville, 2000), 205-224



'Rubbing up against Others: Montaigne on pilgrimage', in: Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel (Reaktion: London, ), 101-123.