Profile Dr. Regula Hohl Trillini
Regula Hohl Trillini trained as a pianist in Basel and London before studying English and German. Her first book, The Gaze of the Listener (Rodopi, 2008), analyzes the place of musical performance in the English imagination from Shakespeare to the Edwardian period.
Regula's research has focused on intertextuality in the early modern period, including early Shakespeare quotation and Shakespeare's own handling of his sources. Thousands of such references can be accessed in the HyperHamlet database, which Regula co-designed and continues to edit. Her monograph Casual Shakespeare (Routledge 2018) is based on this work and has been reviewed as a “superb example of today's digitally-based literary scholarship”. Regula has been able to extend the database approach to early modern quotation in general with the SNF project WordWeb / Intertextuality in Drama of the Early Modern Period. The WordWeb-IDEM database now maps a network of one-liners and catchphrases which links more than 10’000 passages from plays written between 1533 and 1688.
Regula’s most recent work is on intellectual relationships between Britain and Switzerland in the 17th century, which she is exploring as Senior Researcher on the SNF project SwissBritNet. Her interest in this field was first awakened by learning about the 17th-century scholar Johann Jacob Frey, who fell in love with Britain as a student and learnt English well enough to be ordained at Westminster at age 23. Frey’s unpublished correspondence in the UB includes high-ranking British churchmen and scholars as well as aristocratic lords and ladies. No wonder he felt “bound to Basel against my will” even as a highly respected Professor of Greek at our university!