News

Two new Professors at Durham School of Modern European Languages

(31 October 2003)

The School of Modern European Languages at the University of Durham has appointed new Professors of French and German.

David Cowling was Reader and Head of the Department of French at the University of Exeter and has now been appointed to a Professorship of French. Nicholas Saul, former Head of Department at the University of Liverpool, has been made Professor of German.

David Cowling’s main research concerns late medieval and early modern French literature. He focuses particularly on the Rhétoriqueurs, a group of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth- century writers associated with the courts of France and Burgundy.

His current research activities include study of the role of figurative language in the vernacular writings of Henri Estienne, with special reference to the use of metaphors of economic exchange in the context of discussions of linguistic borrowing, and of the role of metaphor in political writing in French in the late medieval and early modern periods. He also plans to investigate the reception of the Roman poet Quintus Ennius in Renaissance France.

Professor Cowling is the author of two books: Building the Text: Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medieval and Early Modern France (O.U.P.) and Les Douze Dames de Rhétorique, édition critique (Droz). He has also written a number of chapters in books, conference papers and articles in academic journals.

He was awarded a DPhil in French and the Junior Paget-Toynbee prize for Old French Language and Literature by the University of Oxford, having graduated from the same university with a BA (Hons) in Classics and Modern Languages (French and Latin). He was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Exeter in 1993 and was promoted to a senior lectureship in 2000. Nicholas Saul, who joins the University as a Professor of German, has a PhD from The University of Cambridge, where he also graduated with a BA in Modern Languages. In 1982 he was appointed to a Lectureship in German at Trinity College Dublin, where he was elected Fellow in 1990 and Senior Lecturer a year later. Since 1998 he has been Professor of German at the University of Liverpool.

Professor Saul has held many research awards, including scholarships and Fellowships. For the academic year 2004-5 he has been elected to a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship in order to complete both the monograph project Gypsies and Orientalism in German Literature form Realism to Modernism (Legenda) and a study edition of literary works featuring Romanies.

His research focuses on problems of literature, culture and ideas in the modern period from Romanticism onwards.

He has published extensively, including two sole-authored books, essays and monographs. An essay on his current major research interest, the Role of the Romanies in European Cultures, is now in press.

Further information:

Daphne Buijs, Public Relations Office, daphne.buijs@durham.ac.uk, 0191 334 6076