I work in the field of eighteenth-century literature and thought, with a particular interest in the ways in which authors create a public image of themselves, both in their lifetime and after their death.
My current research studies evocations of authors in the genre of the dialogue des morts. I explore this commemoration of the author through textual means, asking how such texts draw on and reimagine an individual’s reputation in life, how they construct the social value of literature for their writers and audiences, and how they relate to new cultures of mourning and memorialisation in the late 18th and early 19th century.
As part of this project, I produced a critical edition of Olympe de Gouges’ Mirabeau aux Champs-Elysées and related texts (MHRA, 2017), which provides a preliminary glimpse of the commemorative genre. In a similar vein, I co-edited a special issue of the journal Early Modern French Studies, entitled Anticipated Afterlives: Envisaging Posterity in Early Modern France (with Joseph Harris), which appeared in 2018.
I am now working on a monograph drawing together much of this work. Provisionally entitled Imagined Afterlives in Eighteenth-Century France, it uses the dialogue des morts and other fictional afterlife texts to examine the use of the idea of posterity as an imaginative tool in late eighteenth-century France.
I am also involved in collaborative projects around the topic of death, in particular with Helen Swift, with whom I ran an event at Oxford’s Curiosity Carnival in September 2017. In 2018 I ran an MHRA-funded conference on ‘Death on Stage’. An edited volume based on this conference appeared with Legenda in 2022, entitled Last Scene of All: Representing Death on the Western Stage.
Finally, I am interested in literary translation, and in 2020 published an online, open access translation of Charles Palissot’s 1761 play Les Philosophes with OpenBook publishers as a collaborative project with my undergraduate students.
Other research interests include: the author and textual authority, gloire and posterity, death, names and anonymity, eighteenth-century theatre and dramatic theory, intellectual and literary networks, socio-historical approaches to literature, the commedia dell'arte, the Opéra-Comique, Franco-Italian exchange.
My current research studies evocations of authors in the genre of the dialogue des morts. I explore this commemoration of the author through textual means, asking how such texts draw on and reimagine an individual’s reputation in life, how they construct the social value of literature for their writers and audiences, and how they relate to new cultures of mourning and memorialisation in the late 18th and early 19th century.
As part of this project, I produced a critical edition of Olympe de Gouges’ Mirabeau aux Champs-Elysées and related texts (MHRA, 2017), which provides a preliminary glimpse of the commemorative genre. In a similar vein, I co-edited a special issue of the journal Early Modern French Studies, entitled Anticipated Afterlives: Envisaging Posterity in Early Modern France (with Joseph Harris), which appeared in 2018.
I am now working on a monograph drawing together much of this work. Provisionally entitled Imagined Afterlives in Eighteenth-Century France, it uses the dialogue des morts and other fictional afterlife texts to examine the use of the idea of posterity as an imaginative tool in late eighteenth-century France.
I am also involved in collaborative projects around the topic of death, in particular with Helen Swift, with whom I ran an event at Oxford’s Curiosity Carnival in September 2017. In 2018 I ran an MHRA-funded conference on ‘Death on Stage’. An edited volume based on this conference appeared with Legenda in 2022, entitled Last Scene of All: Representing Death on the Western Stage.
Finally, I am interested in literary translation, and in 2020 published an online, open access translation of Charles Palissot’s 1761 play Les Philosophes with OpenBook publishers as a collaborative project with my undergraduate students.
Other research interests include: the author and textual authority, gloire and posterity, death, names and anonymity, eighteenth-century theatre and dramatic theory, intellectual and literary networks, socio-historical approaches to literature, the commedia dell'arte, the Opéra-Comique, Franco-Italian exchange.