Award of PhD on Catalan Studies to James Thomas

At the Centre for Catalan Studies we are delighted to announce that our postgraduate student James Thomas has been awarded a PhD for his thesis entitled ‘The Anglophone Reception of Catalan Literature: 1780-1900’. Quite exceptionally, the thesis was passed without any corrections demanded by the examiners.

His doctoral supervisor, Professor John London comments: ‘It is difficult to overestimate the importance of James’s research. His study changes the way we will now think about the presence of Catalan writing in Great Britain and North America. Far from being an exclusively twentieth-century phenomenon, James has revealed how major literary figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Morris, Henry Longfellow, and Robert Southey came into contact with the work of Catalan authors.’

James says: ‘When I started the doctorate in 2020, I knew from prior research that there had been a substantial Anglophone reception of medieval and modern Occitan literature during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Therefore I was convinced that something similar had happened for Catalan and, sure enough, that was indeed the case. To discover that major authors such as Robert Southey and Henry Longfellow were keen readers of Catalan was an exciting revelation for me, as was finding a plethora of individuals I had not encountered before. Hopefully I have opened the door for further study. Although finding much that had not been examined in any depth before, I finished with a sense that only the tip of the iceberg has been revealed. If I have contributed anything to Catalan Studies, I hope that it is two elements. First, that a substantial Anglophone knowledge of Catalan can be traced back well before the early twentieth century. Second, that much of this reception has been hiding behind a parallel interest in its less fortunate neighbour Occitan, a language which Anglophone Catalan scholars might consider investigating further. I am very grateful indeed to my supervisor Professor John London for giving me this opportunity, my colleagues and friends at the Centre for Catalan Studies, my examiners Dr. Barry Taylor and Professor Kirsty Hooper for their suggestions and interest, the Institut Ramon Llull for providing funding, and the various scholars (Catalan-speaking and otherwise) who have helped me and shown interest along the way.’