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). In his doctoral thesis, Christian focused 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. Soon after his death, Coryate sank into relative oblivion – a status which has not changed much since, but is quite unwarranted, as Christian aimed to prove. He is currently preparing the thesis for publication.

Notice Board

From May 2025 onwards, my office hour will be on Wednesdays from 12 to 1.

Geisteswissenschaften/Anglistik/Amerikanistik

Address
Universitätsstr. 12
45141 Essen
Room
R12 R05 A30
Office hours
nach Vereinbarung

Functions

  • Wissenschaftliche/r Mitarbeiter/in, Anglistik: Britische Kultur- und Literaturwissenschaft - British Literature and Culture

The following publications are listed in the online university bibliography of the University of Duisburg-Essen. Further information may also be found on the person's personal web pages.

    Book articles / Proceedings papers

  • Heyl, Christoph; Feser, Christian
    Durbar Personas : Thomas Roe and Thomas Coryate at the Mughal Court
    In: India and the Traveller: Aspects of Travelling Identity / Banerjee, Rita (Eds.) 2023, pp. 45 – 71
  • Feser, Christian
    Thomas Coryate und sein Orientbild
    In: Orientalist gazes: reception and construction of images of the ancient Near East since the 17th century / Europe and the ancient Near East. Reception and construction of images of the ancient Near East since the 17th century, 03. – 04. März 2021, online / Droß-Krüpe, Kerstin; Garcia-Ventura, Agnès; Ruffing, Kai; Verderame, Lorenzo (Eds.) 2023, pp. 1 – 17
  • Feser, Christian
    The Mental Optician : On the Telescope in Early Modern Literature and Art
    In: Final frontiers: exploring, discovering and conquering in the Age of Enlightenment / Münderlein, Kerstin-Anja (Eds.) 2021, pp. 147 – 164
  • Books, Collections, Proceedings

  • Feser, Christian; Rampersad, Chandni (Eds.)
    Conviviality and Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century : Restoration to Romanticism
    Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier 2025
  • Travel writing
  • Early modern sociability and literary networks
  • Astropoetics
  • Cultural literacy

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.

Conferences co-organised

with Christoph Heyl and Chandni Rampersad: LAPASEC 2025 - Class in the Long Eighteenth Century: Britain and Beyond / Les classes sociales au cours du long dix-huitième siècle (Grande-Bretagne, Europe et colonies). Essen, April 2025.

with Christoph Heyl and Chandni Rampersad: LAPASEC 2023 - Conviviality and Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century: Restoration to Romanticism. Essen, March 2023.

Publications

See tab "Publications", and

“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.