Jennifer Oliver

Research interests: My research is mostly concerned with sixteenth-century French literature, culture, and thought. I tend to work at and across the edges of disciplines: between early modern literary and cultural studies and the histories of craft and technology; art and architectural history; nonhuman and eco-critical theory; and metaphor theory. 

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. Mineral Matters explores mineral agency and nature-cultures in the literary works of authors including Rabelais, Ronsard, Léry, Montaigne, and d’Aubigné, and technical writings by (for example) the architect Philibert de l'Orme and the ceramicist Bernard Palissy.

In my earlier work on shipwreck (see publications list below), I became interested in the intersections and overlaps between the material and the metaphorical, and I continue to think about what has been termed ‘matterphor’ in my new work. In 2018 I co-founded the international interdisciplinary research network Writing Technologies, and I continue to enjoy collaboration and conversation with colleagues across a range of disciplines. Before coming to Harvard, I held several teaching and research fellowships at the University of Oxford. I have been awarded grants, scholarships, and fellowships from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, the EU's Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme, and the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Durham University.  

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-critical theory, and with film and other visual media. These classes are often concerned with questions of materiality and embodiment, including conceptions of ‘nature’ in relation to the human and/or the artificial, and tend to view literary forms as spaces or objects for ‘working out’ these and other questions.

I am currently an advisor to graduate students on projects concerned with (for example): early modern literary ecologies, literary and material ‘matters’, writing as a quasi-organic extension of the self, the relationships between environment, gender, and the ‘animal’, and transcultural literary reception in the French ‘Baroque’. 

When I’m not thinking about minerals and matterphor, I can often be found making things — including music, such as playing bass with DIY noise-pop band Lucy Leave.

Select Publications:

Monograph:

Shipwreck in French Renaissance Writing: The Direful Spectacle (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Edited volumes:

Elemental Objects: Early Modern Experiment between Text and Matter eds. Vittoria Fallanca, Jennifer Oliver, and Olivia Smith, (forthcoming: currently in production in BREPOLS Techne series)

Making Early Modern Materialism(s)/Fabriquer le(s) matérialisme(s) (XVI^e-XVIII^e siècles), special issue of Libertinage à l'époque classique (XVI^e-XVIII^e siècle), eds. Jennifer Oliver and Isabelle Moreau, forthcoming 2027

Articles and book chapters:

‘Rock, Paper, Chisel: Tracing Texture and Tactility in Philibert de L’Orme’s Premier tome de l’architecture (1567)’, in Elemental Objects: Early Modern Experiment between Text and Matter (Brepols, as above, forthcoming)
 

‘“Materializ[ing] his ideas”? The Making of Palissy’s Materialist Legacies’ in Making Early Modern Materialisms (in special issue of Libertinage et Philosophie, as above, forthcoming 2027)

‘Celebrating Machines in Sixteenth-Century Lyon’, for The Culture of Celebration in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Richard Cooper, edited by Emma Herdman and Valerie Worth with (Cambridge: Legenda, 2024), pp. 75-90

'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)