I am an Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in French at St Catherine's College, Oxford. 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 first book, Goldoni in Paris: La Gloire et le Malentendu, was published with Oxford University Press in March 2017. This book examines the thirty years that the Italian dramatist, Carlo Goldoni, spent living and working in France. He describes this period as the peak of his authorial career, yet critics have tended to view it as a failure, or forget about it entirely. This study tries to work out why. It re-examines both Goldoni’s own accounts of the period, and the context in which his Parisian career took place, in order to understand why he presented it as he did, and why this presentation went so badly wrong. Far more than a straightforward career biography, this book covers previously unexamined areas of eighteenth-century theatre history, maps the constraints and requirements of authorial achievement in the period, and considers how best to evaluate the success of an individual’s self-fashioning, in life and in posterity.
My current research follows on from my consideration of Goldoni's posterity, studying 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 other 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 is forthcoming with Legenda in 2022, entitled Last Scene of All. Representing Death on the Western Stage.
Finally, I am interested in literary translation, and recently 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 first book, Goldoni in Paris: La Gloire et le Malentendu, was published with Oxford University Press in March 2017. This book examines the thirty years that the Italian dramatist, Carlo Goldoni, spent living and working in France. He describes this period as the peak of his authorial career, yet critics have tended to view it as a failure, or forget about it entirely. This study tries to work out why. It re-examines both Goldoni’s own accounts of the period, and the context in which his Parisian career took place, in order to understand why he presented it as he did, and why this presentation went so badly wrong. Far more than a straightforward career biography, this book covers previously unexamined areas of eighteenth-century theatre history, maps the constraints and requirements of authorial achievement in the period, and considers how best to evaluate the success of an individual’s self-fashioning, in life and in posterity.
My current research follows on from my consideration of Goldoni's posterity, studying 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 other 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 is forthcoming with Legenda in 2022, entitled Last Scene of All. Representing Death on the Western Stage.
Finally, I am interested in literary translation, and recently 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.