Current lectures

• 2024 SS

  • The British Rock Invasion
  • Nostalgia and the British Cultural Imagination
  • Blocktermin Hausarbeiten

Past lectures (max. 10)

• 2023 WS

  • Early Modern Travel Writing
  • The Interregnum

• 2023 SS

  • "Perfectly Mad": William Blake
  • Nationalism and National Identities in the Anglo-Saxon World

• 2022 WS

  • A Survey of British Literature Gr. 5
  • E3 - GeiWi_Angl - A Survey of British Literature Gr. 5 - Cr. 3-3
  • Conviviality and Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century: Restoration to Romanticism (LAPASEC 2023 conference)

• 2022 SS

  • Trump, Brexit and Anglo Saxon Populism
  • Party Politics: The Court Masque

• 2021 WS

  • Grundkurs Literaturwissenschaft (Introduction to Literary Studies) Gr. 6

• Travel writing
• Early modern sociability and literary networks
• Astropoetics
• Cultural literacy

In his doctoral thesis, Christian focusses on eccentricity in the works of Thomas Coryate (1577?-1617), an English writer, courtier and raconteur. Coryate published a travelogue of a proto-Grand Tour, Coryat’s Crudities: Hastily gobled up in Five Moneths Travells in 1611, and only months later, set out on an even more daring adventure: a journey, undertaken mostly on foot, which was to take him from Constantinople to Safavid Persia and eventually to the court of the Grand Mughal in Northern India. On the way, he sent several letters back to England, but the bulk of his manuscripts is lost. Soon after his death, Coryate sank into relative oblivion – a status which has not changed much since, but is quite unwarranted, as Christian aims to prove.

• Deutscher Anglistenverband
• British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS)
• Cultural Literacy Everywhere (CLE)

Conference papers and other contributions

"‘Chewed in the Braines of the Author, and cast up in the presse of the Printer’: Material Knowledge in Coryats Crudities (1611)", European Society for the Study of English, University of Mainz, September 2022.

"Wicked Wives and Horrible Husbands: 'True Tragedies' on the Elizabethan Stage", Captivating Criminality 8: Crime Fiction, Femininities and Masculinities, University of Bamberg, July 2022.

"Thomas Coryate und sein Orientbild", Europe and the Ancient Near East: Reception and Construction of Images of the ANE since the 17th Century, University of Kassel, March 2021 (digital event).

Short contribution on Paradise Lost, Cultural Literacy in Europe Symposium: Research in the Arts, the Arts in Research, University of Łódź, May 2020 (digital event).

“The Mental Optician: Exploring the Mind with Telescopes from Defoe to Hogarth”, Landau-Paris Symposia on the Eighteenth Century, University of Bamberg, October 2019.

“Thomas Coryate and Pre-Colonial India”, European Society for the Study of English Doctoral Symposium, University of Wrocław, August 2019.

“‘N.B. I did not visit the arsenal’: Travelling eccentrics in Coryat’s Crudities (1611) and Another Traveller! (1768-69)”, International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference, University of Edinburgh, July 2019.

Publications

"Thomas Coryate und sein Orientbild", in: Kerstin Droß-Krüpe, Agnès Garcia-Ventura, Kai Ruffing and Lorenzo Verderame (eds.). Orientalist Gazes: Reception and Construction of Images of the Ancient Near East since the 17th Century (Münster: Zaphon, 2023).

with Christoph Heyl. "Durbar Personas: Thomas Roe and Thomas Coryate at the Mughal Court", in: Rita Banerjee (ed.). India and the Traveller: Aspects of Travelling Identity (New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2022), pp. 45-71.

“The Mental Optician: On the Telescope in Early Modern Literature and Art”, in: Kerstin-Anja Münderlein (ed.). Final Frontiers: Exploring, Discovering, Conquering in the Age of Enlightenment (Trier: WVT, 2021), pp. 147-164.

Grants and scholarships

2022: ESSE travel grant.

2020: DAAD travel grant (forgone due to COVID-19); 2-month scholarship at the German Historical Institute in London.

2019: DAAD travel grant; ESSE travel grant.

Public outreach

"Thomas Coryate: A Gentleman on an Elephant", VHS Essen (by invitation of the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft Ruhr e.V.), 18 October 2023.