Skip to main content

Rebecca is a third-year DPhil candidate at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and one of the co-convenors for Queer Intersections Oxford for 2024-25.

Her thesis looks at the intersections of esotericism and identity in the works of lesbian French poet Renée Vivien (1877-1909). Her main areas of interest are French-, English- and Russian-language literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with an emphasis on queer theory, reception, and subjectivity.

Prior to this, she completed a BA in French and Beginners' Russian at Oxford (2019) and a Masters in Comparative Literature at Sorbonne Université (2022), where she produced two Masters dissertations on the verse and prose works of Renée Vivien, Sophia Parnok, and Oscar Wilde.

She has also been involved in a number of Digital Humanities projects, including the digitisation of the registers of the Comédie-Française under Florence Naugrette (2022) and the transcription of Renée Vivien's teenage diaries (ongoing).

Undergraduate Teaching

  • Prelims French Paper II: Unseen and Seen Translation for Trinity College (MT 2024, HT 2025, TT 2025)
  • Prelims French Paper I: Grammar for Faculty of MML (emergency cover for MT 2024)
  • Prelims French Paper IV: George Sand, Indiana for The Queen's College (1 revision session in TT 2024)
  • Prelims French Sole Paper XII: Introduction to French Literary Theory for the Faculty of MML (HT 2025, TT 2025)
  • FHS French Oral for the Faculty of MML (emergency cover for MT 2024)
  • FHS French Paper VIII for Pembroke College (1 tutorial in HT 2025)

Conference & Seminar Papers

  • ‘“This is my body that is broken for you”: Renée Vivien, Sappho, and the Poetics of Fragmentation,’ I Love You... To Fragments Conference, Maison Française d'Oxford (10/03/2025).
  • ‘“Je suis plus que tienne, je suis toi-même”: fusions et fissions du sujet lesbien chez Renée Vivien’ Colloque Contre-je, ENS Lyon (22/11/2024).
  • ‘The Cosmopolitan Queer: Renée Vivien's Translations as De/Construction,’ Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Discussion Group, Oxford (21/10/2024).
  • ‘“Every Saint has a Past, Every Sinner has a Future”: Queer Hagiographies of fin-de-siècle Paris,’ Producing and Receiving the Nineteenth Century (Semicentennial NCFS Colloquium), Duke (19/09/2024).
  • ‘“Tu subiras éternellement le sortilège du passé”: Renée Vivien's Queer Bodies in the Grip of Queer Time,’ 66th Annual Conference of the Society for French Studies, Stirling (2/07/2024).
  • ‘Lesbian Bed (Un)Death: Renée Vivien's Poetic Necromances,’ Fin de Sexe? Symposium, Edinburgh (27/06/2024).
  • ‘Written in the Stars? Renée Vivien's Poetic Cosmology of Gender,’ French Graduate Research Seminar, Cambridge (23/05/2024).
  • ‘Here Be Lesbians: Sex, Blood, and the Peripheries of Empire in 19th-Century Tales of Sapphic Lust,’ Queer Intersections Oxford Research Lunch, Oxford (7/05/2024).
  • ‘Monsters Out of the Closet? Nightmarish Lesbian Identity in fin-de-siècle France, French Graduate Seminar, Oxford (17/10/2023).
  • ‘Paradoxes de la création littéraire chez Renée Vivien, la “Muse aux Violettes,”’ Colloque Muses, Égéries, Pygmalions, Bordeaux-Montaigne (26/04/2023).
  • ‘“Quelle est cette femme damnée ?” Witchcraft as a blueprint for lesbian existence in the poetry of Renée Vivien,’ Magic: Enchantment and Disenchantment (21st Annual Conference of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes), Oxford (27/03/2023).

Publications

Public Engagement

  • Curator of the ‘Renée Vivien, enfant terrible of the Belle Époque?’ exhibition at the Taylor Institution (22/04/2024-2/05/2024).