Joseph Harris

Joseph Harris

Professor

  • TW20 0EX

Personal profile

Personal profile

 

 

 

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. 

 

Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

  • SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being
  • SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Keywords

  • Early-modern literature, especially drama; spectatorship and audience response; laughter; gender and sexuality; identification; misanthropy; death; violence; murder; suicide