Timothy Hampton
Professor of French and Comparative Literature

Professor Hampton’s principal research interests revolve around the relationship between literature and politics, historiography, questions of cultural transmission and cross-cultural encounters. He is currently at work on a project analyzing the relationship between literature and diplomacy in Renaissance Europe, from Machiavelli to Leibniz.

Publications include:
Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Cornell University Press, 2009).

“The Diplomatic Moment: Representating Negotiation in Early Modern Europe” Modern Language Quarterly (2006)

“Monstrous Signs: Monstrosity and the Rhetoric of Description in Rabelais and Montaigne” in Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities (Cornell University Press, 2004)

Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Cornell University Press, 2000; winner of the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for the best book in French and Francophone Studies)

Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Cornell University Press, 1990)