Joseph Harris

Joe Harris is a specialist in early modern French literature, with a particular focus on theatre. His research into death, violence and audience spectatorship in Corneille’s tragedies feeds into his final-year course ‘Villains and Villainy on the Early Modern French Stage’. In other courses he also teaches early modern playwrights and novelists such as Molière, Racine, Prévost and Madame de Graffigny; these authors allow him to develop his research interests into questions of gender, laughter, passion, sexuality, psychology and stagecraft. He is currently finishing a monograph on death, murder, and mortality in the works of Pierre Corneille. He is embarking upon a new research project on misanthropy in European literature from 1650-1850, which will cover authors such as La Rochefoucauld, Hobbes, Rousseau, Schiller, and Kotzebue, and misanthropic figures from Timon of Athens and Molière’s Alceste to Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge.