Joseph Harris

I'm Professor of Early Modern French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Much of my research focuses on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French theatre, but in recent years my research interests have reached out in various directions from there. I've written widely on early modern French drama and dramatic theory, focusing on topics such as cross-dressing, laughter, audience response, identification, death, and violence. I'm currently finishing a monograph about misanthropy in Western European literature and thought from the late Renaissance until the early Romantic period, which explores writers including Shakespeare, Molière, Hobbes, Pascal, Swift, Rousseau, Schiller, Kotzebue, and Leopardi. I am also writing a critical edition of Louis-Sébastien Mercier's 'Timon d'Athènes', a politicised Revolution-era adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy 'Timon of Athens'.