Oyvind Johannes Hamre, Downing

Biographical Information

Hailing originally frm Oslo, Norway, I studied for a Bachelor's of Literature at the University of Bergen, before getting my Master's from The University of Oslo. As part of my bachelor's degree, I spent a year at Sorbonne in Paris, taking courses in classical letters and languages.

I wrote my Master's on 'tragic choices' in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mouches, where I explored how each writer's intellectual background shaped their depictions of the limits of human agency. I showed how literary motifs were used to create complex patterns of agency and responsibility, focussing especially on moments of doubt and anxiety in the face of a ‘tragic choice’.

I'm an Aker Scholar at Cambridge, and my doctoral studies are generously supported by the Aker Foundation.

Research Interests

My current research examines the intersection between martyrdom and Early Modern tragedy, looking at how martyrdom established paradigms for suffering, sacrifice, truth, and memories.

My broader research interests include: the tragic genre and the idea of 'the tragic'; early modern intellectual history; Latin literature; agency and theories of the will; German idealism; intellectual history in classical Greece; and biblical exegesis in the Reformation.