Jenny Mander
MA (Cantab), PhD (Cantab)
College roles
Fellow (A)
College Lecturer in French
Director of Studies in History & Modern Languages
Director of Studies in Modern & Medieval Languages
Postgraduate Mentor
President of the SCR
University roles
Professor of French Intellectual History and Intercultural Dialogue
Associate Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement
Biography
Professor Jenny Mander is a specialist in the cultural history of the eighteenth century, focusing on the movement of people and ideas.
Jenny is Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement, and Fellow and Director of Studies at Newnham College.
A member of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, she is a specialist in literary and cultural history of the eighteenth century, focusing on the movement of people and ideas. She is specifically interested in the entanglements between labour migration, tourism, other modes of travel and states of settlement and ‘stuckedness’.
She has recently completed a collaborative critical edition of the abbé Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes – arguably the first major example of a world history, probing the social, economic and political consequences of European overseas commerce and colonialism.
Her current work concerns the place of storytelling in the theory and practice of hospitality in the context of globalisation and international relations. She is particularly keen to connect historical perspectives and arts-led thinking to 21st-century challenges as framed by the UN SDGs and Global Compact for Migration. To this end, she has, amongst other projects, been interpreting Voltaire’s famous line: ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin’ in partnership with local community projects, working with artists and musicians.
Research Interests
Dr Jenny Mander’s research focuses on the connections between the movement of peoples and the traffic in books across Europe and between Europe and the Colonial World (Americas in particular).
Of particular interest is the role played by migrants and their descendants in modern language education (either as tutors and/or as authors of language teaching publications) and in the book trade, with particular focus on French Huguenot émigrés, émigrés during the Revolutionary wars and labour migrants, especially from France and Germany. Equally of interest in this context are the multilingual migrants to the West Indies/Americas during the seventeenth/eighteenth centuries.
Recent publications include Remapping the Rise of the European Novel (SVEC 2007: 10); (with Cecil Courtney) Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes: colonialism, networks and global exchange (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, October 2015); ‘Eighteenth-century Foreign Imports’ in The Oxford History of the Novel, vol. 2, ed. Karen O’Brien and Peter Garside (OUP, 2015); ‘Castles for Sale? Picaresque itineraries and the eighteenth-century French novel’ in The Picaresque novel in Western Literature (CUP, 2015); ‘Turkish Delight? The Confecting of Turkish Theatrical Entertainment for Ottoman guests in France’, Esprit Créateur (2013).
She recently completed a critical edition of Book X of Raynal’s eighteenth-century Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes – arguably the first major example of a world history, probing the social, economic and political consequences of European colonialism.