Professor Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly

Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly, M.A., (M.A. Nat. Univ. Ireland, Dr.phil. Basle)
Professor of German Literature, Fellow of Exeter College
Chair, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages
Address:  Exeter College, Oxford, OX1 3DP
Homepage:  http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/women-and-death/
Email:   helen.watanabe@exeter.ox.ac.uk
Tel:   01865 279601
Fax:   01865 279630

Research

Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly's main research interests are in German literature and culture from the late 15th to the early 18th centuries within their European context, in women's writing in all periods and in the representation of women in German literature and culture. She has made a special study of early modern court festivals of all kinds throughout Europe. She has just completed a book on the representation of the woman warrior in German literature and art to be published by OUP in June 2010: Beauty or Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present.

Teaching

Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly teaches every aspect of German literature from 1450 to 1730 from the invention of printing to the dawn of the Enlightenment. Special interests are the Reformation and its consequences; women's writing in the early modern period; early modern theatre and drama; early modern poetry of all kinds; court culture; gender constructions and their depiction in literature.

Selected Publications | View all publications

'The Eroticization of Judith in Early Modern German Art', in: Gender Matters. Rereading Violence, Death and Gender in Early Modern Literature and Culture, ed. Mara Wade (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010)

Beauty or Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)

With Sarah Colvin (eds.), Women and Death 2: Warlike Women in the German Literary and Cultural Imagination since the Renaissance (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009)

'Literature and the Court 1450-1720', in: The Camden History of German Literature vol.I , ed. Max Reinhart (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007), 621-651

'Religion and the Consort: Two Electresses of Saxony and Queens of Poland (1697-1757)', in: Queenship in Europe, 1660-1815. The Role of the Consort, ed. by Clarissa Campbell Orr (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), 252-275

'Höfische Literatur des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts', in: Die Literatur im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit, ed. by Werner Röcke and Marina Münkler (Vienna, Munich: Hanser Verlag, 2004), 362-393

'Kunstkammer, Library and Chamber of Anatomy: The Management of Knowledge at the Dresden Court in the early modern period', in: Ways of Knowing, ed. by Mary Lindemann (Boston: Brill, 2004), 53-65

With J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (eds.), Europa Triumphans. Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe, 2 (London: Ashgate, 2004)

'Damals wünschte ich ein Mann zu sein, umb dem Krieg meine Tage nachzuhängen. Frauen als Kriegerinnen im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit.', in: Erfahrung und Deutung von Krieg und Frieden. Religion - Geschlechter - Natur und Kultur (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2002), 357-368

Court Culture in Dresden from Renaissance to Baroque (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)

Information last updated: 20/11/09 13:32