Doctoral Workshop in Medieval and Early Modern English Studies

Participants

Interested PhD students and staff from all CUSO and CUSO-affiliated universities are invited to attend, and CUSO PhD students can have their travel expenses reimbursed. For more information, see the website of the CUSO doctoral programme in English, http://english.cuso.ch/.

 

Geneva Participants

 

Guillemette Bolens

Guillemette Bolens holds a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature from the University of Pennsylvania and a Doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Geneva. She spent a year at Cornell University on a research fellowship. She taught Medieval English Literature as an assistant and “maître-assistante” before being appointed full professor at the University of Geneva in 2005. Her research interests are in the history of the body and corporeal logics in classical, medieval and contemporary literatures. Her current research project focuses on kinesics and the analysis of gestures, postures, movements, and facial expressions in visual and verbal arts. This interdisciplinary project links the fields of narratology and rhetoric (in literature), gesture studies (in sociology and anthropology), action understanding (in philosophy and psychology), embodied cognition (in neuroscience), and kinesthetic semiotics (in dance theory). (department website, click here)


Sarah Brazil

Sarah Brazil holds a joint honours B.A in English and Greek and Roman Civilisation, an MA in Medieval English Literature from University College Dublin, Ireland (U.C.D.), and a PhD in medieval English literature from the University of Geneva, with a dissertation entitled ‘Covering and Discovering the Body in Medieval Theology, Literature and Drama’. Sarah’s research interests include Classical literature, late Medieval and Early Modern literature and intertextuality. (department website, click here)


Corinne Clark

Corinne Clark is a PhD student and graduate teaching assistant in the English Department. She holds a Masters in English (650-1550) from the University of Oxford, where she studied at Merton College, and she received her undergraduate degree in English from Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. She possesses a professional background in digital publishing and administrative research support, and she has worked with archives and academics across the UK and North America. (department website, click here)


Mark Darcy

Mark Darcy holds a BA from Maynooth University and an MA in English from the University of Geneva. He is writing a PhD thesis on Satanic Epistemologies in Early Modern English Texts. He was the recipient of an early-PhD-student scholarship from the Institut d’histoire de la Réformation of the University of Geneva


Lukas Erne

Lukas Erne is Professor of English Literature at the University of Geneva. His research interests include Shakespeare, English Renaissance drama and poetry, editorial theory and practice, book history, and questions of authorship. (department website, click here)


Georgia Fulton

Georgia Fulton holds a BA Hons in English Literature from the University of Durham, and an MPhil in Renaissance Literature from Clare College, University of Cambridge. She is a graduate teaching assistant in the English Department and is working on a PhD thesis on 'Early Tudor Humanism in Shakespeare’s Tragicomedies'. (department website, click here)


Elizabeth Kukorelly-Leverington

Elizabeth Kukorelly-Leverington has a Bachelor of Science in International Relations from the London School of Economics and a Licence ès Lettres from the University of Geneva. She completed a Doctorate ès letters at the same institution in 2008, entitled: “Samuel Richardson’s Pamela Part II: Authorship, Readership and Moral Authority in the Early Novel.” She was a teaching and research assistant in the Geneva English Department from 2002 to 2008, and a maître assistante from 2008 to 2013, before becoming a lecturer (chargée d’enseignement). Her research interests include the early English novel, discourse analysis (Foucault and Bakhtin), non-literary texts and their interactions with “literary” texts, early eighteenth-century cultural studies (including gender, legal and conduct concerns), and interdisciplinary approaches to literary studies. (department website, click here)


Charlotte Potter

Charlotte Potter is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate and Lecturer in the Geneva English Department. She completed herAHRC-funded PhD in English Literature at the University of Sussex in 2022, with a thesis entitled ‘Unfixed Virginity: Metaphor and Defloration in Early Modern Drama’. She also holds an MPhil in Renaissance Literature from Newnham College, Cambridge (2017), and an MA in English Literature from the University of St Andrews (2015). (department website, click here)


Andy Reilly

Andy Reilly is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate and Lecturer in the Geneva English Department. He holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Lausanne, which he completed in 2022 with a thesis entitled “William Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Publication and Performance, 1709–1735”. He also holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Lausanne (2017), a Masters in Education (Applied Linguistics) from the Open University (2015), and a BA in Drama and Theatre Arts from Goldsmiths College, University of London (2003). (department website, click here)


Devani Singh

Devani Singh obtained her Ph.D. in English from the University of Cambridge. She also holds an M.Phil. in English Studies (650-1550) from the University of Oxford and a B.A. in English from the University of Toronto. Devani's research interests span the period 1400-1700, and include the history of reading in the vernacular, the history of the material text, the book trade, and the early modern afterlife of medieval books. (department website, click here)


Emily Smith

Emily Smith has an MSt in English Literature (1550-1700) from Oxford University and a BA (Hons) in English Literature from the University of Durham. For her PhD thesis, she is currently researching ambiguous signification in early modern drama, under the supervision of Prof. Lukas Erne. Her research interests include dramatic reception and adaptation, the intersection of digital humanities methodologies and literary close reading, and interdisciplinary approaches. She is also very passionate about public engagement and outreach activities, particularly the production of costumes, events, and performances, and serves as an alumni adviser for the social mobility charity The Sutton Trust. (department website, click here)


Nadine Weiss

Nadine Weiss holds an MA from Yale University and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, specializing in seventeenth-century devotional lyric poetry. (department website, click here)


 

Ex-Geneva-participants

 

Aleida Auld

Aleida Auld holds a BA, an MA and a PhD in English from the University of Geneva. She wrote a doctoral thesis on ‘Reconfiguring Early Modern English Poetry in the Editorial Tradition: Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton’, and was a graduate teaching assistant in the English Department, specializing in early modern English literature.


Tamsin Badcoe

Tamsin Badcoe gained a BA (Hons) in English Language and Literature and an MA in Renaissance and Romantic Literature from the University of Liverpool.  She received her PhD from the University of York where she also taught in the English department from 2007 to 2010. She was in Geneva as a postdoc in 2010-11. She then taught as a Postdoctoral Lecturing Fellow at the University of East Anglia before being appointed to a full-time Lectureship at the University of Bristol.


Ioana Balgradean

Ioana Balgradean was an assitant and PhD student in the Geneva English Department. Her PhD thesis, entitled ‘The Poet’s Grasp at Emotion: Medieval Configurations of Sloth’, was completed in 2011 (http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:18158).


Julianna Bark

Julianna Bark holds a Licence ès lettres from the Université de Genève, and a MA and PhD in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Her PhD thesis explored the Genevan career of the eighteenth-century pastellist Jean-Etienne Liotard.  She was a teaching and research assistant at the University of Geneva for two years and now teaches at Webster University Geneva (see here).


Antoinina Bevan Zlatar

Antoinina Bevan Zlatar holds a BA in English from the University of Oxford, a DES, and a Doctorate in early modern literature and Reformation history from the University of Geneva. Since 2004 she has been a lecturer at the University of Zürich, teaching Sidney, Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton among others. She has also taught at the University of Geneva. Her research interests include early modern genre theory, rhetoric, religious culture and the history of reading, with a focus on John Milton. She is Treasurer of the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies.


Amy Brown

Amy Brown’s chief research interest is the treatment of gender in literature. She holds a BA and an M. Phil from the University of Sydney, and a PhD from the University of Geneva, which she completed in 2018. Her doctoral thesis focused on literary representations of opposite-sex friendships in Middle English and Anglo-Norman texts.


Emma Depledge

Emma Depledge holds a BA in English and an MA in English Literary Research from the University of Leicester, England. She has also studied at L’Università di Torino, Italy. Her PhD thesis, completed in 2012, is entitled ‘Shakespeare Alterations of the Exclusion Crisis, 1678-1682: Politics, Rape, and Authorship’ (http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:20357). She is now Professor at the University of Neuchâtel (see here).


Susanna Gebhardt

Susanna Gebhardt received her BA and MA in 2006 in English Literature, and her Masters of Literature in Shakespearean Studies in 2007 from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Her research interests include early modern literacy, and the visual culture of early seventeenth-century London. She did a PhD at the University of Geneva from 2007 to 2013, with a thesis exploring wall-writing, single-sided printing, paper reuse, and shop-signs (http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:28679).


Johanna Harris

Johanna Harris completed her BA at the University of Sydney in 2002. She then moved to the University of Oxford where she completed her MSt. in English in 2004, and DPhil. in 2009. She was in Geneva as a postdoc in 2009-10, before returning to Oxford, where she held a teaching lectureship in 2010. She is now Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of Exeter (for her website, see here).


Florence Hazrat

Florence Hazrat has a PhD from the University of St Andrews, and holds a BA and M.Phil. in English Literature from the University of Cambridge. She is particularly interested in sound studies, the conjunction of music and poetry, Renaissance rhetoric, and the socio-cultural history of literary form. She was at the University of Geneva from 2016 to 2018, working with Professor Lukas Erne on a translation and an edition of an early modern German version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. She is now a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Sheffield (see here).


Petya Ivanova

Petya Ivanova studied English and History at the Faculty of Letters at the University of Geneva, where she was a PhD student and assistant in the English Department, working under the supervision of Professor Guillemette Bolens. Her PhD thesis investigates issues of corporeity and language, articulated around the use of gesture as signifier of expressive presence in a number of literary texts, ranging from the Medieval to the Early Modern and contemporary periods. She completed her PhD in 2014 (http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:37197).


Emilija Kraguevska

Emilija Kraguevska holds an MA from the South East European University in Macedonia where she wrote a thesis about female language and discourse in Shakespeare’s tragedies. She was in Geneva in 2012-13 as the recipient of a Swiss Government Scholarship.


Keith McDonald

Keith McDonald was a teaching and research assistant in the English Department of the University of Geneva for two years (2008-10) and was researching the connections between Andew Marvell and privacy. He went on to pursue PhD research at the University of Leicester.


John McGee

John McGee did a PhD in English at the University of Geneva, completed in 2014, with a thesis entitled ‘Anti-Petrarchism in Early Shakespeare’ (http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:39804).  He has published several articles, including ‘Shakespeare’s Narcissus: Omnipresent Love in Venus and Adonis’ in Shakespeare Survey in 2010, and ‘A Set of Wit Well-Played in Romeo and Juliet Act 2, Scene 3?’ in Shakespeare (2013).His first degrees were in Indian literature, including an MA at the University of Calgary and a BA at the University of Toronto. He also holds an MA from the University of Dallas. 


James Misson

James Misson is a book historian interested in understanding print culture through computational methods. His PhD thesis from the University of Oxford presents statistical models of the connections between typography, languages, and culture in the sixteenth century, as well as close readings of typographically unusual books. James holds a BA and an M.St. from the University of Oxford, and a Post-Baccalaureate in Post-Classical Latin from the University of California, Los Angeles, and has interned at the Beinecke Library and the Yale Center for British Art. He has taught Medieval and Early Modern literature at the University of Oxford, and is an Editor of the Material Evidence in Incunabula database. At the University of Geneva, he worked on the research project 'To the Reader: The English Preface in Print, c. 1475-1623' (PI, Devani Singh). He now works for the Oxford English Dictionary.


Dana Monah

Dana Monah is a PhD student at the Universities of Alexandru Ioan Cuza, Iaşi, and Paris III, working on modern productions and adaptations of Shakespeare. She spent the academic year 2010-11 at the University of Geneva.


Beatrice Montedoro

Beatrice Montedoro has a BA in English and Art History and an MA in English from the University of Geneva. She was the recipient of a studentship to St. John’s College, University of Oxford, in 2012 and, in the same year, presented a paper at the conference of the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies (SAMEMES) on ‘Words as Sickness: The Dramatization of Bewitchment in Middleton’s The Witch and Dekker’s The Witch of Edmonton’. She is now pursuing a DPhil on the early modern commonplacing of English drama at the University of Oxford.


Oliver Morgan

Oliver Morgan holds a BA in English from Pembroke College, Cambridge, an MA in Early Modern Literature and Culture from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in English from the University of Geneva, where he taught as a graduate teaching assistant and as a 'maître assistant' from 2011 to 2019.  He is now a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge.


Ruth Mullett

Ruth Mullett holds an M.St. in English 650-1550 from Oxford University, an MA in Medieval Studies from Cornell University, and a Ph.D. (with a dissertation on Putting on the Armor of God: Defensive Reading in England, c. 1215-1550), also from Cornell University. Broadly speaking, she is interested in how medieval literary history can be seen to move through a conversation with the cultural past. Her research interests include Middle English literature, book history, palaeography and codicology, and digital humanities (particularly manuscript imaging and digital cataloging techniques). She taught at the University of Geneva from 2017 to 2018.


Lucy Perry

Lucy Perry received her PhD in medieval English from King’s College London and has held positions at the University of Lausanne and University College Dublin. She has also taught at the University of Bern. Her research interests are medieval historiography and romance, and Arthurian literature. She is currently engaged in preparing the third and final volume of the edition of La3amon’s Brut for the Early English Text Society and is working on a monograph on La3amon’s Brut and the English Verse Chronicle up to 1340. She mainly teaches Old and Middle English language and literature.


Azamat Rakhimov

Azamat Rakhimov holds an MA in English from the University of Geneva and is working on a PhD dissertation on the adaptation of Shakespeare in Russia.


Madeline Ruegg

Madeline Ruegg, who has an MA from the University of Neuchâtel, joined the doctoral workshop as a post-graduate researcher from 2009 to 2011. She pursued a PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin, with a thesis on ‘The Patient Griselda Myth in Early Modern European Drama’.


Kareen Seidler

Kareen Seidler holds a Licence ès Lettres from the University of Geneva and an MPhil in English Renaissance Literature from the University of Cambridge. Her MPhil thesis was awarded the Martin-Lehnert-Prize of the German Shakespeare Society in 2010. She did a PhD at the University of Geneva, completed in 2012, with a thesis entitled ‘Shakespeare on the German Wanderbühne in the Seventeenth Century: Romio und Julieta and Der Bestrafte Brudermord’ (http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:26539). She was a teaching and research assistant at the University of Geneva for two years before working at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include textual studies, the theater in all its facets and, of course, Shakespeare (see here).


Maria Shmygol

Maria Shmygol received her doctorate from the University of Liverpool, with a thesis entitled ‘‘A Sea-Change’: Representations of the Marine in Jacobean Drama and Visual Culture’. She also holds an MA in Renaissance and Eighteenth-Century Literature (2010) and a BA in English Language and Literature (2009) from the University of Liverpool. She has previously taught at her alma mater, where she also worked as a research assistant for the Oxford Hakluyt Project, and, more recently, at the University of Sussex. Her research interests include early modern drama, textual editing and print culture, as well as material and visual culture more broadly. Her current project is an edition of William Percy’s underwater play, The Aphrodysial (1602). She was at the University of Geneva from 2016 to 2019, working with Professor Lukas Erne on a translation and an edition of the 1620 German adaptation of Titus Andronicus. 


Liz Skuthorpe

Liz Skuthorpe's research interests include the history of emotions, mythology and folkloristics, performance, and speech act theory. She attained a BA from the University of Technology, Sydney and an MA from the University of Iceland, before teaching and doing research in the Geneva English Department.


Fiona Tolhurst

Fiona Tolhurst held a BA in Psychology and English Literature from Rice University (Houston, Texas) and an MA and PhD in English Language and Literature from Princeton University. A Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities funded her graduate work. Before coming to Switzerland, she served as an assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor of English at Alfred University (Alfred, New York) where she taught Anglo-Saxon and Middle English literature as well as medieval women writers and a travel course about Rome. Her research interests included Arthurian literature, medieval mystics, and literary defences of women. While in Switzerland from 2008 to 2013, she taught at the Universities of Basel, Berne and Neuchâtel and was a lecturer in medieval and early modern English at the University of Geneva. She moved on to become Associate Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University. She sadly passed away in 2021.


Sarah Van der Laan

Sarah Van der Laan, who has a BA and a PhD from Yale and two MAs from Queen Mary College, University of London, was hired in Geneva as a post-doctoral researcher in the English department before moving to Indiana University as an assistant professor of Comparative Literature (for her website, see here).


Juliette Vuille

Juliette Vuille holds a PhD from the University of Lausanne, with a doctoral thesis on ‘Holy Harlots: Authority, Gender, and the Body in Medieval English Hagiography’ (2013). She was chargée d’enseignement suppléante in the Geneva English department in 2013-14, before going on to pursue post-doctoral research on an SNSF scholarship. She is now a Maître d'enseignement et de recherche at the University of Lausanne.


Louise Wilson

Louise Wilson gained her BA (Hons) in English Language and Literature from Oxford University and her MA and PhD in English Renaissance Literature from the University of York. She was a post-doctoral researcher in the English department of the University of Geneva before moving to the University of St Andrews, where she is now the recipient of a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (for her website, see here).