Dr Emilia Wilton-Godberfforde

Emilia Wilton-Godberfforde is a specialist in seventeenth-century French drama and currently works at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics. She is fascinated by modes of deception across a range of texts and genres. Her current interests include resurrection and playing dead in early modern theatre and visual culture. Books she has written include Mendacity and the Figure of the Liar in Seventeenth-Century French Comedy, an exploration of lying across a range of plays in the early modern France and English-French Translation, a co-authored monograph on French grammatical structures, the nuances of different styles and registers, and the perils and pleasures of translation. She has recently completed a co-edited book exploring French literature in translation across the centuries, to be published in 2025. She has also co-edited a special issue of Early Modern French Studies, Variations of Vileness in Early Modern French Writing. Prior to returning to Cambridge, she was Head of French at the Open University (School of Languages and Linguistics) and Lead for the Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership. From 2016-18, she was a Visiting Associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She has also taught at Birkbeck, Queen Mary, Paris 7 and the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon. She currently sits on the executive committee of AUPHF+ which seeks to nurture all areas of French studies. She is also on the Board of Gender and Otherness in the Humanities, a research centre which works on a variety of fields in the Humanities including Creative Writing, Music, History, Theatre Studies, Art History and Classical Studies. With Professor Christophe Gagne, she hosts the Choix Goncourt UK with students from Cambridge, working with the Higher Education, Research and Innovation Department at the French Embassy, the Maison Française d’Oxford and the Institut français du Royaume-Uni. She founded and led the OU Goncourt initiative from 2020-2024.

She is also a qualified simultaneous interpreter and translator and continues to works with French and Italian speakers and texts on a range of projects.