Christian Feser
Contact
University of Duisburg-Essen
Institut für Anglophone Studien
R12 R05 A30
Universitätsstr. 12
45141 Essen
Germany
Room: R12 R05 A30
E-Mail: christian.feser@uni-due.de
Phone: +49 201 183-4325
Office hours: Please consult the official list of office hours
Notice Board
Biographical Information
Christian Feser received a B.A. from the University of Bamberg and an M.A. in English and American Studies from the University of Bamberg and the City University of New York. His M.A. thesis investigated changes in early modern British law and the practice of physiognomy as reflected in selected works by Fielding, Hogarth, Mayhew and Dickens. In the autumn of 2017, he joined the Chair of British Literature and Culture as a research assistant (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter). He is currently working on his doctoral thesis.
Areas of Interest
- Travel writing
- Early modern sociability and literary networks
- Astropoetics
- Cultural literacy
PhD Project
In his doctoral thesis, Christian focusses on the use of 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 venture: 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 stashed 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.
Research
Conference Papers and other Contributions
"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
“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). (forthcoming)
with Christoph Heyl. "Durbar Personas: Thomas Roe and Thomas Coryate at the Mughal Court", in: Rita Banerjee (ed.). Travel and Self-Fashioning: India Over the Years (forthcoming).
Grants and Scholarships
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.
Teaching
SuSe 2021
Repressed and repressive? English Literature during the Interregnum
WiSe 2020/21
Grundkurs Literaturwissenschaft (Introduction to Literary Studies), Gr. 3
Grundkurs Literaturwissenschaft (Introduction to Literary Studies), Gr. 4
WiSe 2019/20
A Survey of British Literature, Gr. 4
SuSe 2019
Early Modern Travel Narratives
WiSe 2018/19
Breaking "mind-forg'd manacles": William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Grundkurs Literaturwissenschaft (Introduction to Literary Studies), Gr. 12
SuSe 2018
Grundkurs Literaturwissenschaft (Introduction to Literary Studies), Gr. 6
Grundkurs Literaturwissenschaft (Introduction to Literary Studies), Gr. 7
WiSe 2017/18
Grundkurs Literaturwissenschaft (Introduction to Literary Studies), Gr. 11
Grundkurs Literaturwissenschaft (Introduction to Literary Studies), Gr. 12