Pre-Modernists Reading Proust
In anticipation of their upcoming podcast, Proust Curious, Hannah Weaver and Emma Claussen share their experiences with reading, teaching, and delighting in the works of Marcel Proust as pre-modernists.
A native Midwesterner, Hannah Weaver is now Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, where she writes and teaches about the literature of medieval Europe, particularly the regions now known as England and France. She asks questions about how the physical forms that stories take can inform us about how medieval people thought.
Emma Claussen did her undergraduate degree at Worcester College, Oxford and an MA at KCL, before returning to Oxford for a D.Phil in French at St John’s. She then held a Career Development Fellowship at New College, Oxford (2016-19), before joining the University of Cambridge as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2019-23), during which time she was also a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University. She joined Trinity College in 2023.
Emma works at the intersection of literary criticism and the history of ideas. Her first book is Politics and Politiques in Sixteenth-Century France: A Conceptual History (Cambridge, 2021). It examines uses of the word ‘politique’ and changing conceptions of politics during the Wars of Religion (1562-98).
