Research
I work on early modern literature and culture. My first book was on tragedy and political theory. My next book, Compassion’s Edge, tackled the affective undertow of religious toleration, exploring the language of fellow-feeling – pity, compassion, charitable care – that flourished in the century or so after the Wars of Religion. It’s a gloomy sort of account: this is not a story about compassion overcoming difference, but rather about compassion reinforcing divides. The project was supported by a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard, and the book won the Biennial Book Prize of the Society for Renaissance Studies. With Kristine Steenbergh, I also co-edited a volume on compassion in early modern Europe more broadly; thanks to her influence, that’s a somewhat cheerier take.
I have continued work on early modern affect and/or toleration (a forthcoming chapter on the Revocation and family life, an article on Racine and emotion) but have also just finished a very different third book manuscript on river writing in early modern France and its colonial interests, taking in rivers from the Lignon to the Rhine, the Saint Laurent to the Senegal. It's provisionally entitled Reading with Rivers in the Early Modern French World. I’ve carried out research for the American tributaries of this work as a visiting fellow at the John Carter Brown library in Providence (where I also co-curated an exhibition on water in the Americas) and at the Library Company of Philadelphia; a year’s writing was supported by the Leverhulme Foundation.
In future years I want to think more about how these emotional and environmental interests intertwine; I’m planning to work on the history of floods. Meanwhile, I’m writing about ingratitude in seventeenth-century writing, and I’m beginning a very different sort of project about how twentieth-century English women writers read women writers of the French seventeenth century.
Teaching
For the faculty, I have lectured on a range of early modern topics: gender and early modern writing, France and the Americas, authors such as Lafayette or Racine. At the postgraduate level, I have taught on the MSt Methods option on Spaces of Comparison, and served three years as Director of Graduate Studies in Modern Languages, which let me see the exciting range of work done across the Faculty.
I'm currently serving as the Director and Senior Scholar in Residence at Ertegun House, supporting graduate students working across the full range of humanities subjects, and will not be teaching for the faculty until autumn 2029, though I continue to work with DPhil students.
I have supervised or am currently supervising DPhil students working on Huguenot memoir, on early modern French writings about India from an environmental perspective, on seventeenth-century food and affect, and on emotion and the history of Atlantic slavery. I welcome applications from prospective DPhil students working on early modern French writing of all kinds, and especially those interested in emotions and affect or the environmental humanities.
Selected Publications
On (in, around) water
"The False River of Julien Poydras, Poet, Politician, Plantation Owner," forthcoming in Humanities special issue on ‘Aqueous Territories,’ edited Camille Mathieu
“Saved from the waters: the drowning world of Paul Lejeune.” In Before Canada, ed. Allan Greer (Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024), pp 246-267
“Sheepships: Robin Mouton Goes to Sea (Rabelais, Choisy, Voltaire),” French Studies, 74.2 (2020): 1-15.
On emotion
Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and its Limits in Early Modern France (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018)
Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice, co-edited with Kristine Steenbergh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) (with a chapter on the counter-Reformation)
A Cultural History of Love in the Early Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2024), edited and introduction
“Faking it: affect and gender in the Essais.” In Montaigne, Affect, Emotion, ed. Todd Reeser. Special issue, Montaigne Studies XXX: 1-2 (2018): 69-82.
On theatre
The Style of the State in French Theater, 1630-1660: Neoclassicism and Government (Ashgate, 2009)
Walter Benjamin’s Hypothetical French Trauerspiel, co-edited with Hall Bjornstad, special issue of Yale French Studies 124 (2013)
Background
I was educated at a comprehensive school in west London, and then read English and French at New College, before leaving for California where I got my PhD in French from UC Berkeley. My first job was at the University of Michigan; I came back to the UK in 2009 to teach at University College London, before moving to Oxford in 2017.