Academic Staff
Dr Barbara Ravelhofer
Career
Barbara Ravelhofer is Reader in English Literature at Durham and a Research Associate of the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge. After a degree in English and German Literature from the University of Munich she continued for her Ph.D. at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College. She has also held Visiting Fellowships at the Universities of Bologna, Princeton, and Harvard.
Research
Apart from her general interest in English Literature, Dr Ravelhofer has written on European spectacle of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, editing and book history in comparative perspective, as well as oral forms of literature. Her edition of a seventeenth-century French dance treatise, Louange de la danse (2000), explores the life and professional practices of dancers and musicians in early modern London and Paris. Her most recent book, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (2006), studies illusionistic theatre of the Renaissance. Drawing on a massive amount of documentary evidence relating to English productions as well as spectacle in France, Italy, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, the book elucidates professional ballet, theatre management, and dramatic performance at the early Stuart court. Dr Ravelhofer would welcome students with research interests in early modern English literature and comparative literature.
Current Project
The Complete Works of James Shirley (OUP)
Sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
James Shirley (1596-1666) is a Caroline writer in the tradition of the great Elizabethans and Jacobeans. An innovative dramatist specializing in tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, masque, pastoral, entertainment, morality, and neo-miracle, Shirley wrote for a wide variety of theatres, ranging from the Blackfriars to the first public playhouse in Dublin, but he also composed poems and grammars. Shirley’s strong female characters prepared the ground for women on the Restoration stage. Critics still appreciate his elegant craftsmanship, his fast-paced, witty dialogues, and his detached portrayal of social manners. The Complete Works of James Shirley will comprise a corpus of around 50 works in 10 volumes, including plays, poems, and prose. The project is jointly directed by Prof. Eugene Giddens, Anglia Ruskin University, Dr Teresa Grant, University of Warwick, and Dr Ravelhofer. It currently involves over thirty scholars from the UK, US, Germany, and South Africa. The Complete Works of James Shirley has had initial support from the British Academy. A major AHRC research grant (Principal Investigator: Dr Ravelhofer) funds ongoing work on an old-spelling online edition as well as the OUP modern-spelling edition of Shirley's oeuvre for the years 2008-13. For details see the project website.
Review Articles
Barbara Ravelhofer has written many review articles in: Renaissance Quarterly, The Seventeenth Century, Kritikon, Internationales Archiv f. Sozialgeschichte der Literatur (IASL) and Atlantic Studies.
Research Groups
- Editing, Bibliography and History of the Book
- European Frontiers
- Renaissance Studies
- Romantic and Pre-Romantic Studies
Selected Publications
Books: authored
- Ravelhofer, Barbara. (2006). The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Essays in edited volumes
- Ravelhofer, B. (2012). Middleton and Dance. In The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton. Taylor, Gary & Henley, Trish. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 130-147.
- Ravelhofer, B. (2011). History and Story: Voivode Dracula in Fifteenth-Century German Manuscript, Print, and Oral Poetry. In English Language and Literature Studies: Image, Identity, Reality. Ed. Spremic, M. Belgrade: Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. 17-36.
- Ravelhofer, B. (2010). 'Ancient Greece, Dance, and the English Masque'. In The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World: Responses to Greek and Roman Dance. Ed. Macintosh, Fiona. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 211-223.
Journal papers: academic
- Ravelhofer, B. (2006). 'Non-Verbal Meaning in Caroline Private Theatre: William Cavendish's and James Shirley's The Varietie (c.1641)'. The Seventeenth Century. 21(2): 195-214.
- Ravelhofer, B. (2005). 'Oral Poetry and the Printing Press in Byron's The Giaour (1813)'. Romanticism. 11(1): 23-40.
- Ravelhofer, B. (2002). ‘“Beasts of Recreacion” Henslowe’s White Bears.’. English Literary Renaissance. 32(2): 287-323.
- Ravelhofer, B. (2002). ‘Virtual Theatres’. Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie 4: 133-50.