Professor Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly
"I am interested in the early modern period, that is, the era that begins with the invention of printing around 1450. This opened up learning to anyone who could read in the way that the internet has opened information up to anyone with access to a computer. Printing then made the spread of the Reformation possible, one of the greatest upheavals in European history with huge political consequences right up to today. Seeing how people dealt with this upheaval – through polemic, comedy, lament or prayer – tells us something about how people deal with upheavals in any age. The same period gave rise to the extremely glamorous world of the court and brought such colourful art forms into being as the ballet and the opera. The fascination for me is seeing how all this fits together.
Why are women represented in literature and art either as pure and innocent victims, as witch-like seductresses or as warrior women? And why, whichever way they are portrayed, do women so often have to die at the end of the novel, the play, the opera or the film, so that order can be restored? Working out why men need these imaginings and how women write back is one of my current concerns."
I was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Wolfenbüttel in 1986-87, a British Academy Reader in the Humanities in 1997-1999, a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2007-5, Distinguished Mellon Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007 and a Guest Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin in 2009.
I teach a wide range of literature and language to Exeter students, but within the Sub-Faculty of German I am particularly responsible for the period 1450-1730, which I teach to students of any College.
Research Interests
I have done a lot of research on the literature and culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My first book was Melancholie und die melancholische Landschaft. Ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte des 17. Jahrhunderts (1978). In recent years I have worked on court culture, especially court festivals, not just at German speaking courts but throughout Europe. My main publications here are Triumphal Shews. Tournaments at German-Speaking Courts in their European Context 1560-1730 (1992), (with Anne Simon) Festivals and Ceremonies. A Bibliography of Works relating to Court, Civic and Religious Festivals in Europe 1500-1800 (2000). and (with Pierre Béhar) Spectaculum Europaeum. Theatre and Spectacle in Europe, Histoire du Spectacle en Europe (1580-1750) (1999). Court Culture in Dresden from Renaissance to Baroque appeared with Palgrave in 2002 and Europa Triumphans. Court and Civic Festivals of Early Modern Europe (with J R Mulryne and Margaret Stewring) with Ashgate in 2004.
I have edited The Cambridge History of German Literature (1997), as well as writing the chapter on early modern literature in it myself, and have worked on writing by women in German in the 16th and 17th centuries (cf my chapter on this in A History of Women's Writing in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, ed. J M Catling (Cambridge University Press, 2000). I am interested in writing by women in German in any period.
Literary translation is another of my interests and I have published Friedrich Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, A Translation with Notes and Introduction (1981) and Adalbert Stifter, Brigitta and Other Tales, A Translation with Notes and Introduction (1989), reprinted as a Penguin Classic in 1994.
I am currently very interested in the representation of women in German culture and in writing by women. From 2005 to 2008 I directed (with Professor Sarah Colvin of Edinburgh University, another Exonian) an AHRC-funded research project entitled ‘Representations of Women and Death in German Literature, Art and Media 1500 to the Present' (http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/women-and-death/). In 2010 Oxford University Press will publish my book called Beauty or Beast? Representations of the Women Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present.
