LAFONT Agnès
Position : Lecturer-Researcher
Title : Associate Professor
CNU (National Council of Universities) section: English studies
Department : UFR2
Institutional affiliation : Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
Email : agnes.lafont (at) univ-montp3.fr
Agnès Lafont works on the reception of classical myths in Renaissance England, in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries John Lyly, George Peele, and Christopher Marlowe, as well as in poetry. She studies the circulation of classical models (especially Ovid and, more recently, post-Homeric models) and the way in which various rewritings, especially French, shape the English reception from the 1550s to the 1620s. She is particularly interested in the figure of Myrrha and the treatment of incest in the English Renaissance.
She works on Shakespeare’s Erotic Mythology and Ovidian Renaissance Culture (Routledge, 2013) and co-edited with Janice Valls-Russell and Charlotte Coffin Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his contemporaries (Manchester University Press, 2017). Her most recent co-edition, with Marie-Pierre Noël (Sorbonne University) and Pierre Pontier (Sorbonne University), is a special issue on the reception of classical mythology over the long term ‘Autour des mythes de Thésée et de Perséphone. Tradition, Transferts, Transmissions (Antiquité-XVIIe siècle)’, Les Cahiers du Théâtre Antique, 22, 4, 2021.
She is a regular contributor to A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Classical Mythology and is Assistant Editor of Cahiers Élisabéthains.
Research subject areas :
- Classical mythology, myth of Diane
- Poetry of mythology
Teaching :
- 16th–17th-century English literature