Fellowship Lunchtime Lectures: Professor Wes Williams
Event
Teddy Hall’s online lunchtime lecture series returns for Hilary Term 2021. It aims to highlight the incredible depth and breadth of research across the Teddy Hall Fellowship. Students, alumni, fellows and staff are welcome to register.
Speaker and Topic
A Year in the Life of the Director of TORCH
Professor Wes Williams, our tutorial fellow of French and Professor of French, assumed the role of the Director of The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) this year. He talks about the role, the innovations and challenges of taking on this post during the Covid pandemic, and gives his vision of how TORCH with its multiple programmes is enriching Oxford’s academic community and public-facing engagement.
About the Speaker
Professor Wes Williams teaches French language and literature, with a particular focus on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; he also teaches European film, and literary theory.
Wes’s main research interests are in the field of Renaissance literature: the critical study of genre and of subjectivity; investigations into the politics of literature, experience, and the popular and professional cultures of the early modern period. His first book – Pilgrimage and Narrative in the French Renaissance: ‘The Undiscovered Country’, Clarendon Press (OUP, 1999) – was the first full-length study of the place of Christian pilgrimage in European Renaissance culture. An exploration of certain interlinking themes – the location, representation, and politics of the sacred, the experience of the everyday and the extraordinary, religious and secular travel – it concerns the literary formation of the subjective narrative voice, and its relationship to the rituals and practices of pilgrimage. He continues to explore, and to write about, travel narratives of various kinds across the period.
In 2012 he completed Monsters and their Meanings in Early Modern Culture; Mighty Magic, a book exploring the cultural meanings of monsters from, roughly, Rabelais to Racine (by way of Montaigne, Titian, Shakespeare and a few others).
He is a founder-member and Director of Oxford Amnesty Lectures.
Registration
You must register in order to receive the Zoom joining link the day before the lecture.
Please note that this lecture will be recorded and published on St Edmund Hall’s digital and print communication platforms where appropriate.