Prof Katherine Ibbett

I work on early modern literature, culture and political thought. My first book was on tragedy (especially Pierre Corneille) and theories of political action, and I continued this conversation between theory and theatre with a coedited volume thinking through Walter Benjamin’s concept of the Trauerspiel and its relevance to a French corpus.  In my second book, Compassion’s Edge, I worked with a broader range of genres, exploring the affective undertow of religious toleration. The book explores the language of fellow-feeling – pity, compassion, charitable care – that flourished in the century or so after the Wars of Religion. It’s a gloomy sort of account: this is not a story about compassion overcoming difference, but rather about compassion reinforcing divides. The project was supported by a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard.

I continue to work on early modern affect but am also beginning a very different third book – Liquid Empire – on the writing of water in early modern France and its territories, from the Pléiade poets of the sixteenth century to the Mississippi settlements of the 1700s. The project takes up the figure of the riverain to think through how river writing shapes a poetics of resource and residency, from the poet to the washerwoman, the Indigenous canoeist to the Versailles nymph. I’ve carried out research for the American tributaries of this work as a visiting fellow at the John Carter Brown library in Providence (where I’m co-curating an exhibition on water in the Americas) and at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Katherine Ibbett | Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages (ox.ac.uk)

Professor Katherine Ibbett is a member of the Environment Humanities Programme at TORCH