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School of Modern Languages & Cultures: Department of French

Staff in the Department of French

Go to the MLAC staff pages.

Dr Thomas Wynn, MPhil (Cantab), DPhil (Oxon)

Senior Lecturer / Director of Research in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures
Director of Research (e.j.welch), School of Modern Languages and Cultures
Telephone: +44 (0) 191 33 43465
Room number: A53

Contact Dr Thomas Wynn (email at thomas.wynn@durham.ac.uk)

Biography

My research focuses on theatre, spectatorship and libertinage in early modern French literature and culture. My monograph Sade's Theatre: Pleasure, Vision, Masochism was published in SVEC in 2007; my critical edition of François II, roi de France, arguably the first example of 'armchair theatre' in France, appeared in 2006; and my edition of rare erotic works by Delisle de Sales and Baculard d'Arnaud was published in 2011. In addition I have produced several critical editions for the Complete Works of Voltaire, and my preface for a recent volume of dramatic works can be read here.

With Professor Pierre Frantz (Paris-Sorbonne), I co-direct the international research group Phoenix. This network investigates the evolving relationship between theatrical representation and public reception in eighteenth-century France; we have published a volume of articles on dramatic space, and in assocation with Sophie Marchand we held a conference on metatheatre. We publish a series of critical editions of eighteenth-century plays; four volumes have appeared so far (Monvel's Les Victimes cloîtrées; two comedies by Piron; erotic comedies; and Laya’s L’Amis des lois). We warmly welcome proposals.

Later this year SVEC will publish my edited volume on the representations of violece in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, featuring articles on subjects such as Sade, trauma, and the mob in the French Revolution.

I am happy to receive applications for PhDs on topics in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature and culture.

Research Groups

  • Literature/History/Theory

Selected Publications

Books: authored

Books: edited

Books: sections

Edited works: journals

Essays in edited volumes

  • 2012 'Sade et la théâtralité dans Quills, la plume et le sang (2001)', in Régine Jomand-Bury & Martine Nuel (eds.), Images cinématographiques du siècle des Lumières, Éditions Kimé, pp. 125-136
  • 2011 'Libertinage', in William Burgwinkle, Nicholas Hammond & Emma Wilson (eds.), The Cambridge History of French Literature, Cambridge University Press, pp. 412-419
  • 2011 'Prostitutes and erotic performances in eighteenth-century Paris', in Ann Lewis & Markman Ellis (eds.), Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Culture, Pickering & Chatto, pp. 87-98
  • 2011 'The commonplace of theatre as a school of virtue: the case of Voltaire’s Tancrède (1760)', in Joop Koopmans & Nils Holger Petersen (eds.), Commonplace Culture in Western Europe in the Early Modern Period III: Legitimation of Authority, Peeters, pp. 131-150
  • 2011 'Un roi en coulisse: le François II du président Hénault', in Pierre Frantz & Thomas Wynn (eds.), La Scène, la salle et la coulisse dans le théâtre du XVIIIe siècle en France, PUPS, pp. 95-106
  • 2007 'Le dialogue dans le théâtre érotique du XVIIIe siècle', in (ed.), SVEC, pp. 223-230
  • 2004 'Masochisme et le tableau sadien', in Norbert Sclippa (ed.), Lire Sade, L'Harmattan, pp. 245-257

Journal papers: academic

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