PD Dr. Antoinina Bevan Zlatar

I am a Privat Dozentin and lecturer in early modern literature with a long history at the English Department in Zurich, as Assistentin (2003-2009), as the recipient of a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione award (2013-2015), and as Oberassistentin (2016-2017). After reading English at the University of Oxford, I completed a Diplôme d’Etudes Supérieures in Renaissance Literatures followed by a Doctorate at the University of Geneva. My first book, Reformation Fictions (Oxford University Press, 2011), explored the ways in which a fashionable humanist genre—the dialogue—was deployed in the service of Protestant propaganda. My second book project focuses on a giant of the literary canon John Milton and the long Reformation, particularly the ways in which his highly visual epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) engages with seventeenth-century visual culture, image debates, and iconoclasm. Other research interests include women and life writing, and more recently, the ways in which early modern literature engages with the natural world. I was Treasurer and then Secretary General of the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (SAMEMES) from 2007 to 2024, and have taught at the Universities of Geneva, Lausanne and Fribourg. In 2020, I was delighted to be asked to join Isabel Karremann’s team, and to continue to share my love of literature with Zurich’s students. 

Research Interests

• Early modern narrative and lyrical poetry and the long Reformation 

• John Milton’s Paradise Lost, visual culture, image debates, and iconoclasm 

• Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and the natural world 

• Early modern genre theory 

• Women and life writing 

• Satire, polemic, and the public sphere