Dr Nora Baker AFHEA

• Doctor of Philosophy, University of Oxford, 2024
• Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, 2022
• Master of Science, University of Oxford, 2018
• Bachelor of Arts, University of Galway, 2017

I am originally from County Galway, Ireland, and completed my schooling and undergraduate university studies there. I undertook my Masters and PhD degrees at University College and Jesus College, Oxford, respectively. My doctoral research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council via the Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership. I have held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Tokyo (2023-2024, funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science), and at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (2024-2026, funded by the Fondation Wiener-Anspach).

Most of my research to date has focused on personal and religious writing from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, primarily in a French-language context, though I am most interested in works that cross national and cultural boundaries. My doctoral research used a trauma theory-informed angle to analyse the autobiographical accounts of Huguenots following the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. I uncovered a range of intertextual and martyrological references in the works under study, adding to our understanding of selfhood and reflexivity in the early years of the long eighteenth century. My monograph on this topic, Huguenot memory, 1689-1757: Narratives of imprisonment, enslavement and exile was recently published in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series by Liverpool University Press (2026). Beyond my work on French Protestantism, I have begun to embark on research in comparative missionary studies, still in-keeping with my interests in personal writing and religiosity, but branching out across the confessional border to look at early modern Catholicism. I have a chapter on the representation of children in the letters of members of the Missions Étrangères de Paris forthcoming in a volume I am editing for Études sur le XVIIIe siècle, a series published by Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles.

I am very excited to be joining Birmingham as a member of the French Language Print Publications in England to 1685 project team, as this venture allows me to combine my interest in multicultural contexts with my experience in the realms of confessional polemic and the emotions associated therewith!