60 seconds with... Professor Alexander Samson

Professor Alexander Samson's Inaugural Lecture

Tell us a little about your research…

I am working on a bilingual edition of a short comic masterpiece by Salas Barbadillo called Los mirones (The Voyeurs) (c. 1620) for Liverpool University Press, thinking about comedy and whether jokes always get lost in translation. Recently, I spent a magical day in the Real Armeria, Madrid, examining a featherwork shield made by indigenous artisans called amantecas, for a case study in a new literary history of Europe forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Lastly, my next book Hispanic Worlds in English Renaissance Culture, brings to fruition a project initiated two decades ago with my Spanish-English Translations Database 1500 – 1640, reconsidering just how much early modern England owed to Spain.

Why is your research important?

I hope my historical research reminds us that the past is not set in stone, that the contingency of lost worlds can be resurrected, voices buried or lost invited to speak once more. This is apparent in my vindication of Mary I as a great English, Catholic queen, despite being written off as a bloody tyrant, as much as in my research on the Golden Age dramatist Lope de Vega, whose dissident radicalism has been unfairly interred beneath the myth of him as an absolutist conservative and religious apologist.

What inspires you in your work?

The wonder of the past and incredible riches hidden, lost, and forgotten in the archive. There is a kind of exquisite agony in realising how vulnerable and contingent our remains are in this atavistic age, while at the same time living in hope that whatever happens a remnant will return to remind us who we are...   

What has been your most memorable career moment so far?

For all the wrong reasons, presenting the Renaissance Festival Texts in Full database at the British Library in 2005 I made the ludicrous claim that one of the books depicted a bear dancing in a ballet with a lit torch. Of course, it was just someone dressed up in a bear costume…

What passions/hobbies do you have outside of work?

I play squash and tennis in a vain attempt to maintain some level of fitness. Just recently I have started trying to learn how to draw. 

What book is currently on your bedside table?

I am just finishing Anne Michaels’ latest novel, Held, a beautiful, lyrical, elegiac meditation on history, longing and love. It is worthy follow up to her first novel, the Orange prize winning Fugitive Pieces, one of my all-time favourites.