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)

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 Research and 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)

Holly Lavergne

Holly Lavergne holds a BA in English and History and an MA in English, both from the University of Geneva. Her Master’s thesis, written while studying abroad at Oxford University, examined the construction of Katherine Philips’ contradictory poetic authorship in her poetry, paratextual material, and manuscript reception. She is currently working on a PhD thesis on early modern women’s poetry under the supervision of Professor Lukas Erne. Her project focuses on the overlooked conceptual networks of remembering surrounding early modern women poets, examining the layers of agency that form and reform women’s poetic reputations. Her research interests include women’s writing, book history, manuscript studies, and reception history, particularly in literature from the medieval and early modern periods. (department website, click here)

Elina Leblanc

Elina Leblanc is a digital humanist, specialised in digital libraries and digital scholarly editions. She holds a master’s degree in « Patrimoine écrit et éditions numériques » from the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance, in Tours. She completed her doctorate in 2019 at the Grenoble Alpes University with a thesis that focused on ways to involve users in the design and enrichment of a digital library, through user studies and participatory services such as citizen sciences. She has been a digital humanist at the University of Geneva since 2020, and now works with Devani Singh on the SNSF project devoted to the groundbreaking Chaucer and Shakespeare research of Caroline Spurgeon (1869-1942). (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 is an SNSF assistant professor at the University of Geneva and Principal Investigator on an SNSF project whose aim is to investigate, digitise, and recontextualise the groundbreaking Chaucer and Shakespeare research of Caroline Spurgeon (1869-1942). She 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. Her research interests span the medieval and the early modern period 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)

Jordan Skinner

Jordan Skinner is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant in Chaucer Studies at the University of Geneva. He earned his doctoral degree in the Department of English at Princeton University. His research focuses on medieval poetry and is informed by his interests in linguistics, legal history, and philosophy. His dissertation, Medieval Curfew: Poetic Space and the Governance of Time, reconsiders the relationship between law and literature by examining how medieval nocturnal restrictions shaped urban policing, forbidden pleasure, and the construction of the working day. Before Geneva, he was a Teaching Transfer Associate at Princeton's McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning and has taught at the Prison Teaching Initiative. (department website, click here)

Emily Smith

Emily Smith is a Senior Research and Teaching Assistant (maître assistante) in the English Department of the University of Geneva. She completed a MSt in English Literature (1550-1700) at Oxford University, following a BA (Hons) in English Literature at the University of Durham. Her PhD thesis, succesfully defended in May 2024, is entitled '"The Play's The Thing?": Underspecification in Shakespearean Drama', and draws upon digital humanities, cognitive, and linguistics approaches. Her research interests include dramatic reception and adaptation, the intersection of digital humanities methodologies and literary close reading, and cognitive approaches to literature. She is currently the Secretary for SAUTE (the Swiss Association of University Teachers of English). (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 was a graduate teaching assistant in the English Department from 2014 to 2021, specializing in early modern English literature. She wrote a doctoral thesis on ‘Reconfiguring Early Modern English Poetry in the Editorial Tradition: Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton’. A revised version of her doctoral thesis was published as Early Modern Authorship and the Editorial Tradition: Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton (Routledge, 2024).

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 from 2009 to 2011 and went on to teache at Webster University Geneva.

Antoinina Bevan Zlatar

Antoinina Bevan Zlatar is a Privat Dozentin and lecturer in early modern English literature at the University of Zurich. 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. 

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. She was an assistant and maître assistante in the Geneva English Department until 2024.

Amy Brown

Amy Brown holds a BA and an MPhil 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.

Corinne Clark

Corinne Clark was a graduate teaching assistant in the English Department in 2023-2024. 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. 

Emma Depledge

Emma Depledge was a research and teaching assistant (2006-2012) and a senior research and teaching assistant (2012-2014) in the English Department of the University of Geneva. Her Geneva PhD thesis was entitled ‘Shakespeare Alterations of the Exclusion Crisis, 1678-1682: Politics, Rape, and Authorship’ (http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:20357). A revised version of her thesis was published as Shakespeare's Rise to Cultural Prominence. Politics, Print and Alteration, 1642–1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is now Professor at the University of Neuchâtel.

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 included 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 went on to be a Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of Exeter.

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 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 went on to be a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Sheffield.

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, and a DPhil from the University of Oxford with a thesis on the early modern commonplacing of English drama. She went on to teach at the University of Zurich.

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.  His book Turn-taking in Shakespeare (Oxford Universtiy Press, 2019), based on his Geneva PhD thesis, was the Winner of the Shakespeare's Globe Book Award 2020. He went on to be 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 include medieval historiography and romance, and Arthurian literature.

Azamat Rakhimov

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. 

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 taught at her alma mater, where she also worked as a research assistant for the Oxford Hakluyt Project, and at the University of Sussex. 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 until 2022.

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.

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.

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. She taught in the Geneva English Department in 2019-2020 and now teaches at the Universities of Fribourg and Neuchâtel.

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 was the recipient of a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. She is now a Senior Lecturer at Liverpool Hope University.