Rabelais remains the Renaissance poet of the belly. Pregnancies and births, urination and excretion punctuate the adventures of his giants Gargantua and Pantagruel. His style fits those themes. According to settled views among critics, the Rabelaisian belly and its related style signal either the comic crowning of our lower regions in the upside-down world of carnivalesque fiction, or humanist satire wielded against diseased body-politics: old universities, the Church.

The project follows literary rivers across texts from France and the Americas, thinking about those rivers as tributaries to a wider oceanic history.

This AHRC funded major research project aims to make the riches of the theatres of Spain and Spanish America accessible to English-speaking researchers and theatre professionals.

This new project explores the trajectories of different forms of infantile weakness in the Spanish Caribbean from the final two decades of the nineteenth century to the 1960s, namely malnutrition, malaria, neonatal infirmity, and poliomyelitis.