Jennifer Oliver
Research interests: the intersections between literary studies and the histories of science, medicine, and technology; art and architectural history; nonhuman and eco-critical theory; and metaphor theory.
Teaching interests: besides pre-modern texts from the medieval to the eighteenth century, I teach with a range of critical and theoretical works, particularly in the field of nonhuman/eco- theory, and I like to build film into my courses wherever I can. My classes are often concerned with questions of materiality and embodiment, including conceptions of ‘nature’ in relation to the human and/or the artificial, and literary forms as spaces or objects for ‘working out’ these and other questions.
I work mostly on sixteenth-century French literature, culture, and thought, and I teach across the early modern period and quite widely beyond. In my current book project Mineral Matters: Crafting Ecologies and Early Modern French Literature, I am interested in how early modern writers and craftspeople contemplated the connections and tensions between poetics, craft/technique, and non-human nature. The book explores mineral nature-cultures in the works of Rabelais, Ronsard, Léry, Montaigne, and d’Aubigné, alongside technical writers like architecte du roi Philibert de l'Orme and the ceramicist Bernard Palissy.
In my work on shipwrecks (see publications list below), I became interested in the intersections between the material and the metaphorical, and I continue to think about what has been termed ‘matterphor’ in this new work. In 2018 I co-founded the interdisciplinary network Writing Technologies, and continue to enjoy collaboration and conversation with colleagues across a range of disciplines. Before coming to Harvard, I held teaching and research fellowships at the University of Oxford.
When I’m not thinking about minerals and matterphor, I can generally be found making things, including music with my band Lucy Leave.
Select Publications:
Monograph:
Shipwreck in French Renaissance Writing: The Direful Spectacle (Oxford University Press, 2019)
Edited volume:
Elemental Objects: Proceedings from a Virtual Showcase, eds. Vittoria Fallanca, Jennifer Oliver, and Olivia Smith, (under review, forthcoming in BREPOLS Techne series)
Articles and book chapters:
'Du navire au livre : La famille des Nefs publiées en France 1497-1507', Réforme, Humanisme et Renaissance 96.1, 2023, 9-36
'Lithic Montaigne: Stone, "bastiment", and "Du repentir" (III, 2)', Montaigne Studies, no. 35 ('Material Montaigne/ Montaigne Matériel'), 35-48
'« Forgé de son invention » : sur la double biomimesis des Essais II.9 et II. 12', Bulletin de la Société internationale des amis de Montaigne, 'Montaigne outre-Manche', no. 74, 2022 - 1, 149-166
'"When is a meadow not a meadow?": Dark Ecology and Fields of Conflict in French Renaissance Poetry', in Early Modern Écologies, eds. Pauline Goul and Phillip John Usher (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), pp. 73-98
'Rabelais’s Engins: War Machines, Analogy, and the Anxiety of Invention in the Quart Livre’, Early Modern French Studies (December 2016)