Professor Caroline Warman

Research

I am interested in literature and the circulation of ideas, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I have recently finished a book on Diderot called The Atheist's Bible: Diderot and the 'Eléments de physiologie' which explores this late work and its fate during the French Revolution. The book is accompanied by a digital edition of Jacques-André Naigeon's Mémoires sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot. I have also published widely on Sade (see Sade: from materialism to pornography, SVEC, 2002). The common thread is the focus on materialist thought.

I want ideas and texts to be able to flow between French and English as much as they did in the period I study, and I therefore do quite a lot of translation, from Isabelle de Charrière’s novellas, The Nobleman and Other Romances (Penguin Classics, 2012), to Diderot's Neveu de Rameau, co-translated with Kate Tunstall and edited by Marian Hobson (OpenBook Publishers, 2014; 2nd edition 2016). Kate Tunstall and I also edited and translated a collection of Marian Hobson's essays, Diderot and Rousseau: Networks of Enlightenment (SVEC, 2011). I co-ordinated the translation by 102 students and colleagues of Tolerance: The Beacon of the Enlightenment which was published on the first anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations.  

Undergraduate Teaching

I teach the First Year survey courses from medieval to modern. I lecture on aspects of French eighteenth and nineteenth century literature and thought, including the Novel 1700-1900, the Encyclopédie, Nineteenth Century French Thought, Literature and Philosophy in the Revolution, etc. I give tutorials on prescribed authors Voltaire and Diderot, and teach special subjects Rousseau, Women's Writing, Discourses of Race, Histories of Violence. I teach translation into and out of French.

Graduate Teaching

I welcome applications at either masters or doctoral level relating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially any aspect of thought or cultural history. See the European Enlightenment Programme.

Other

I was President of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2018-21. I have been a guest on Melvyn Bragg's Radio 4 programme In Our Time (on 'Materialism', 'The Encyclopédie', 'Candide', 'Rousseau and Education') and co-wrote and co-presented (with Kate Tunstall) four short programmes on Diderot as part of Radio 3's Essay: Enlightenment Voices series, see here. I was a judge of the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation prize in 2006 and 2007, see here. I am a member of OUCHE!, the Oxford University Campaign for Higher Education.

For more information, including publications, see here.