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 to examine fictional afterlives across the eighteenth century. The project began from a study of the dialogues des morts genre, which set out to examine literary commemoration as an alternative and/or supplement to other forms of memorialisation in the period. In this vein, the first major output was a critical edition of Olympe de Gouges’ Mirabeau aux Champs-Elysées and other related texts (MHRA, 2017), which provided a preliminary glimpse of the commemorative genre. I also 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. It examines how different individuals conceived of posterity - either the broad notion, or their own specific posthumous reputation - across the early modern period,
I am now preparing a monograph drawing together much of this work. Entitled Imagined Afterlives in Eighteenth-Century France, it has been provisionally accepted by Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, and should be submitted in 2025. The book uses the dialogue des morts alongside other fictional afterlife texts - uchronias, dreams, metempsychosis fictions - to examine how posterity is used as an imaginative tool. The imaginative constructions it explores, whose subject is posterity, play complicated games of projection backwards and forwards, employing the resources of fictional narrative to explore what it means to die and to be remembered - or forgotten. In telling such stories at a time when history itself was especially susceptible to being rewritten and reimagined, they are revealing too about how central an understanding of storytelling, authorship and literary invention is not only for reading the period, but also for appreciating the ways in which humanity constructs itself for both its contemporaries and its descendants.
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 was published with Legenda in 2022, entitled Last Scene of All. Representing Death on the Western Stage.
Finally, I am interested in literary translation, and in 2021 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 to examine fictional afterlives across the eighteenth century. The project began from a study of the dialogues des morts genre, which set out to examine literary commemoration as an alternative and/or supplement to other forms of memorialisation in the period. In this vein, the first major output was a critical edition of Olympe de Gouges’ Mirabeau aux Champs-Elysées and other related texts (MHRA, 2017), which provided a preliminary glimpse of the commemorative genre. I also 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. It examines how different individuals conceived of posterity - either the broad notion, or their own specific posthumous reputation - across the early modern period,
I am now preparing a monograph drawing together much of this work. Entitled Imagined Afterlives in Eighteenth-Century France, it has been provisionally accepted by Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, and should be submitted in 2025. The book uses the dialogue des morts alongside other fictional afterlife texts - uchronias, dreams, metempsychosis fictions - to examine how posterity is used as an imaginative tool. The imaginative constructions it explores, whose subject is posterity, play complicated games of projection backwards and forwards, employing the resources of fictional narrative to explore what it means to die and to be remembered - or forgotten. In telling such stories at a time when history itself was especially susceptible to being rewritten and reimagined, they are revealing too about how central an understanding of storytelling, authorship and literary invention is not only for reading the period, but also for appreciating the ways in which humanity constructs itself for both its contemporaries and its descendants.
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 was published with Legenda in 2022, entitled Last Scene of All. Representing Death on the Western Stage.
Finally, I am interested in literary translation, and in 2021 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.