Gilles Darras

Gilles Darras serves as a Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts, Literature and Languages at the University of Lille, specializing in representations and identities within Germanic, Nordic, and Dutch-speaking regions. His academic profile is deeply rooted in the study of 18th and 19th-century German literature and theatre.

His research centers on the crisis of the Enlightenment as reflected in Weimar Classicism and subsequent German literature, with a focus on authors like Schiller, Kleist, Grabbe, Büchner, and Grillparzer. Darras examines the interconnections between drama, myth, and historical context during the transformative period from the fall of the Holy Roman Empire (1806) to the establishment of the German Empire (1871). He also investigates the representation of the body and psychosomatic themes in theatre, alongside the adaptation of ancient, biblical, and Germanic myths in 19th-century German drama, particularly in the understudied "middle" period between Goethezeit and Fin-de-Siècle.