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Jennifer Oliver

Network co-founder

Assistant Professor (French), Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard jennifer_oliver@fas.harvard.edu

A white woman with short dark hair and bright lipstick smiles at the camera, against a background of sunlit leaves

My research is centred on sixteenth-century French literature, culture, and thought. My first book, Shipwreck in French Renaissance Writing: The Direful Spectacle (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the importance of narratives of shipwreck in the period, reading fictional and allegorical ‘naufrages’ alongside the eyewitness accounts of travel writers in order to explore the relationship between the material and the metaphorical.

In my current book project Mineral Matters: Materials, Making, and Early Modern French Literature, I am interested in how early modern writers and craftspeople contemplated the connections and tensions between poetics, craft/technique, and the natural environment. The book explores mineral nature-cultures in Rabelais, Ronsard, Léry, Montaigne, and d’Aubigné, alongside technical writers like architecte du roi Philibert de l’Orme and the ceramicist Bernard Palissy.

In my previous work on shipwrecks, I became deeply interested in the intersections between the material and the metaphorical, and I continue to think about what has been termed ‘matterphor’ in this new work.

 Faculty profile page: https://rll.fas.harvard.edu/people/jennifer-oliver


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
jenhelenoliver (May 21, 2019). Jennifer Oliver. Writing Technologies . Retrieved December 13, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/vbf9


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