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Fernando Martinez Periset

Ph.D. Student in Comparative Literature, admitted Autumn 2022

BioHello, this is Fernando. Thanks for stopping by! Before joining Stanford's department of Comparative Literature as a doctoral student in 2022, I trained as a comparatist at Durham, the Sorbonne, Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin. My main supervisor here at Stanford is Roland Greene.

In terms of research interests, the main issue I keep coming back to (which partly derives from my experiences studying in different countries) is how and why intercultural encounters function as driving forces of creative production in its different forms. With a focus on big-picture thinking and global perspectives in the study of cultural history, I see such creative practices at work in the overlaps among literature, art history and philosophy, particularly continental philosophy. More precisely, I believe I am drawn to two broad questions: how classical theories of ethics and subjectivity (like Stoicism and Epicureanism) produced changes in societal values within Early Modern culture, and how the Renaissance, in turn, shaped attitudes to selfhood in later movements, especially Romanticism. From the standpoint of transhistorical reception studies, I would like to explore the inner lives of people from the past as a way of finding questions that speak to our own present. That is why specific topics of interest include the intersections of literary forms with the history of emotions, the history of ethics, cognitive anthropology, psychology, migrations, intellectual history and religion. I like poetry (both studying it and writing it), the epic tradition as well as theatre. Beyond French, Latin, Spanish and English, I am expanding into Portuguese and Arabic.

I am currently developing a research project on Milton and the classical tradition.

Some of my favourite authors include figures from Classical Antiquity and Early Modernity, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, Racine, Seneca, Lucretius, Virgil, Homer, Quevedo, but also more recent figures whose work intervenes in and develops preexisting structures of ethics and emotions. I look forward to discovering new, exciting figures.

I would be delighted to hear from students and researchers (from Stanford and beyond!) with whom I could share intellectual interests, so please feel free to drop me a line.