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Professor Ros Ballaster possesses a continuing interest in the representation and construction of the engagement with story as an ethical experience from the late seventeenth century to the mid nineteenth century, especially in the popular novel and in the theatre. She is working to develop a project which will pay attention to the interaction with and role of the theatre in the invention of the ‘novel’ over this period. Her intention here would not simply be to consider the use of novel plots as sources for plays but the presence of theatrical models of character, action and affect in the novel of the long eighteenth century, apprenticeships and continuing engagements with the theatre by more or less successful novelists. A related project concerns Professor Ballaster's attempt to construct a history of the idea of ‘candid’ (as opposed to ‘skeptical’) reading in literary, political and popular writings over the same period. She is interested in supervising doctoral students working in eighteenth-century women's writing, the fiction of fantasy in the same period (oriental fiction, fairy tales), the early novel.
| # | Episode Title | Description | People | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | Book at Lunchtime: Celebrity Culture and the Myth of Oceania | An intriguing case study on how popular images of Oceania, mediated through a developing culture of celebrity, contributed to the formation of British identity both domestically and as a nascent imperial power in the eighteenth century. | Ruth Scobie, Wes Williams, Ros Ballaster, Anna Senkiw | 10 Dec 2019 | |
| 9 | Global Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in Postcolonial Literature - Part 2 | A One-Day International Conference held at the Faculty of English, University of Oxford, on June 25, 2018. | Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ros Ballaster, Ankhi Mukherjee, Robert J. C. Young | 26 Jul 2018 | |
| 8 | Global Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in Postcolonial Literature - Part 1 | A One-Day International Conference held at the Faculty of English, University of Oxford, on June 25, 2018. | Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ros Ballaster, Ankhi Mukherjee, Robert J. C. Young | 18 Jul 2018 | |
| 7 | Mastering Women’s Studies? Habitus and Hazards | Professor Ros Ballaster talks on the beginning of the Women's Studies course at Oxford in 'Mastering Women's Studies? Habitus and Hazards' | Ros Ballaster | 22 Jun 2015 | |
| 6 | Remembering the Corpus [Part 3] | LAL’s importance to comparative literature and ways of reading. Marina Warner leads discussion with Dominique Jullien, Ros Ballaster, Wen-chin Ouyang and Matthew Reynolds. | Marina Warner, Dominique Jullien, Ros Ballaster, Wen-Chin Ouyang | 29 May 2015 | |
| 5 | Creative Commons | Why should we study Johnson? | Professor Ros Ballaster of Mansfield College, Oxford, discusses her current research and proposes we should still study Samuel Johnson. | Ros Ballaster, Sarah Wilkin | 31 Jul 2013 |
| 4 | Creative Commons | The Selden Map | The Selden Map of China has been one of the treasures of the Bodleian Library since 1659. This film shows how this remarkable map is interpreted today by scholars from a range of different disciplines. | Kate Bennett, David Helliwell, Ros Ballaster, Rana Mitter | 29 May 2013 |
| 3 | The novel in early eighteenth century England: Defoe and Haywood | This tutorial with second year students in English at Mansfield College, Oxford University, explores early attempts to define and categorise the 'new' genre of the novel. | Ros Ballaster, Rebecca Loxton, Abigail Rose, Rachel Brook | 10 Apr 2013 | |
| 2 | Creative Commons | Oriental Tales and Their Influence | Prof. Warner and Prof. Ballaster begin their conversation with Antoine Galland's translation into French from Arabic of the 'Alf Layla wa-Layla' as the first two volumes of 'Les Mille et Une Nuit' in the first decade of eighteenth century. | Ros Ballaster, Marina Warner | 26 Mar 2013 |
| 1 | Creative Commons | The Lure of the East: the Oriental and Philosophical Tale in Eighteenth-Century England | Professor Ros Ballaster discusses the objectives of oriental tales published in the second half of the 18th Century which use the sheer power of storytelling to conjure up alternative worlds. | Ros Ballaster | 13 Mar 2012 |