Alice Marion-Ferrand

Please tell us about your research project.

My research focuses on the representation of religion in English comedies produced during the second half of the seventeenth century (called the Restoration period) and adapted from earlier European plays: comedies from the Spanish Golden Age, classical French comedies and in particular Molière’s, and Elizabethan and Jacobean comedies. My aim is to study the modes and processes of adaptation of these religious-themed comedies and the ‘anglicity’ that is, paradoxically, outlined by these borrowings and rewritings. I also want to analyse the construction of religion as a comical dramatic object, as well as the role played by the comedies of the corpus in the transformation of the relation between English society and religion.
 

Could you please tell us a bit more about your scholarship/exchange programme?

I’m here for the month of April thanks to the monthly scholarship offered by the MFO.
 

First impressions of Oxford/the University?

As I expected, the architecture is stunning and the atmosphere of the city fascinating. I can’t wait to wander around and lose myself in the many seventeenth-century archives and manuscripts that can be found in the Bodleian library.