Professor Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly FBA

Early modern German culture; European court culture, especially festivals, of the early modern period; the representation of women in German literature; writing by women in German.

Fellow type: UK Fellow
Year elected: 2012
Subjects: Literature, Modern languages
Sections: Early Modern Languages and Literatures to 1830
Website: http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/watanabe

Summary

HELEN WATANABE-O'KELLY studied German and Spanish at University College Cork, where she took her BA and MA. She did her PhD in German at the University of Basel. She first came to the UK in 1974 as Lecturer in German at the University of Reading and, in 1989, was made Lecturer in German at Oxford University and in 1994 Professor of German Literature. Her main research interests are early modern European court culture, early modern and nineteenth-century German literature, the representation of women and writing by women in German. With colleagues in Germany, Poland and Sweden, she is currently leading a research project funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area): Marrying Cultures: Queens Consort and European Identities 1500-1800 (www.marryingcultures.eu).

Current post

Professor of German Literature, University of Oxford

Past appointments

Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford Professor of German Literature

2013 -

Publications

Court Culture in Dresden: Renaissance to Baroque 2002

Spectaculum Europæn 1999

Beauty or Beast? Representations of the Women Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present 2010

Triumphal Shews: Tournaments at German-Speaking Courts in their European Context 1560-1730 1992

Cambridge History of German Literature 1997

Queens Consort, Cultural Transfer and European Politics 2016

Other Fellows of the British Academy

Professor Alison Shell FBA

Shakespeare and religion; Reformation and Counter-Reformation literature; the vernacular and neo-Latin writing of post-Reformation British Catholics; the literature of Anglicanism; early modern book history and manuscript studies.

Professor Nicholas Roe FBA

All periods of English Literature, particularly Romantic literature and culture; William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Leigh Hunt and John Keats; biography of the Romantics; literature and medicine

Professor Martin Butler FBA

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, especially the drama and theatre; Ben Jonson and his circle; the court masque; textual editing

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