I am Departmental Lecturer in Medieval French and Organising Tutor at St Peter's College. I am a literary historian of the Francophone Middle Ages and early Renaissance. In the 2024-25 academic year, I was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of History at Princeton University, where I held the Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship.
My doctoral thesis offers a major re-evaluation of the early sixteenth century in France as an epoch of anthologies and conceptualises new frameworks for investigating how the art of anthologising works. This project matters because literary anthologies affect what, whom, and how we read, yet their roles and functions in French premodernity remain under-theorised. The corpus includes gardens and orchards of verse, anthologies of war, and single-author anthologies. Authors include more canonical ones such as George Chastelain, Jean Molinet, and Jean Lemaire de Belges, lesser-known poets like Guillaume Cretin, André De La Vigne, and Octovien de Saint-Gelais, as well as numerous minor or anonymous ‘others’.
Outreach and widening participation are central to my academic practice. Before coming to Oxford as a first-generation student, I was educated at state comprehensive schools in Barnsley and Rotherham, South Yorkshire. I regularly deliver academic taster sessions and talks for students from non-selective state schools and colleges. My project at Princeton focuses on using medieval manuscripts as interdisciplinary teaching tools to support widening participation in the arts and humanities. You can read more about it here.
Teaching
I teach the whole Prelims literature course and unseen translation. I teach a range of premodern options to second- and fourth-year undergraduates in tutorials and seminars, including Medieval French Literature (Paper VI) and Medieval Intersectional Identities (Paper XII).
In the Faculty of Medieval & Modern Languages, I lecture on ‘Key Concepts in Medieval French Literature’. In the Humanities Division, I teach language classes on Old and Middle French for the MSt in Medieval Studies.
Peer-reviewed publications
- 'Denis Janot's Chastelaine du Vergier: Ethics and the Spaces of Print Culture in the French Renaissance', in 'La Chastelaine de Vergi': Encounters in Medieval Literary Space, ed. by Sophie Marnette and Helen J. Swift (Boydell & Brewer, accepted for publication).
- 'Les égarements du cœur et de l’esprit dans Le Vergier d’honneur. Repenser la cohérence anthologique au début du XVIe siècle', co-authored with Lucien Dugaz, in Lyrique mise en récit: sur l’agencement de recueils au XVe et XVIe siècles, ed. by Ellen Delvallée and Pascale Mounier (Peter Lang, accepted for publication).
- 'La Normandie rétro? La poésie tardomédiévale imprimée à Rouen de 1540 à 1600', co-authored with Adrian Armstrong, in La Culture médiévale à la Renaissance, ed. by Adeline Desbois-Ientile, Nicolas Le Cadet, and Sandra Provini (Droz, accepted for publication).
- 'Cretin imprimé. Le recueil des Traictez singuliers de Galliot Du Pré (1526)', Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes, 42.1 (2024), 243–64. https://doi.org/10.48611/isbn.978-2-406-17449-3.p.0243
- 'Bodies, Temporalities and Archives: Literary and Filmic Production after the 2010 Haitian Earthquake', French Studies Bulletin, 44.166 (2023), 1–11. **Winner of the Society for French Studies R. Gapper Undergraduate Essay Prize 2021/22. https://doi.org/10.1093/frebul/ktad001
Books reviews
- 'Recovering the Medieval in the French Renaissance: Claude Fauchet's "Veilles ou Observations". By Anthony J. Bruder', French Studies, 79.4 (2025), 707–8 https://doi.org/10.3828/fs.2025.79.4.11
- '"Bon pays de France": enjeu national et joutes poétiques sous le règne de François Ier. Par Nina Mueggler', French Studies, 78.4 (2024), 704–5 https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knae127
- 'Fleurs et jardins de poésie: les anthologies poétiques au XVIe siècle (domaine français, incursions européennes). Sous la direction d’Adeline Lionetto et Jean-Charles Monferran', French Studies, 78.2 (2024), 326–327. https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knae007
Invited lectures
'Anthology Making in an Age of Discovery: French Maritime Poetry in the Print Shop', British Library, June 2025.
'Global Rhétoriqueur Poetry: Jean Parmentier's Voyage to Sumatra in Early Print Culture', Tulane University, New Orleans, March 2025.
'Medieval Francophone Manuscripts in the Princeton University Library', Princeton University, February 2025.
Recent conference papers
'Anthologizing Rebellious Voices; or, What Happened in Dijon after the Battle of Pavia?', Renaissance Society of America, 71st Annual Meeting, Boston, March 2025.
'Composing Poetry, Navigating Oceans: Jean Parmentier’s Blue Poetics', MLA Convention, New Orleans, January 2025.
'"Qu'on luy retient une demye année": Wage Cuts, Strike Action, and the Politics of Precarity in Late-Medieval Francophone Poetry', part of the panel Premodern Precarities, Society for French Studies 65th Annual Conference, University of Stirling, July 2024.
'Court Poetry in the Print Shop, or How to Make an Œuvre (with Michel Foucault)', International Courtly Literature Seminar, Trinity College Dublin, June 2024