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BA University of California at Berkeley, BA MA Cambridge, MA PhD Yale

 

Research

My main research interests lie in medieval and early modern French literature, and in challenging the conventional distinction between them. As my postgraduate training was in Comparative Literature (French, Classics and Italian), I have a keen enthusiasm for working across national boundaries as well as chronological ones. My areas of specialty are literature and gender, courtly and erotic literature, and the influence of classical antiquity on medieval and early modern Europe. I am completing a book on the figure of the female addressee in medieval and sixteenth-century French and Italian literature; it considers both the literary and ethical implications of addressing literature to women. My current research project is a study of the literary and political afterlives of Virgil's Aeneid in medieval and early modern France, with a focus on Aeneas and Dido as refugees who become founders of states. 

Teaching

I teach French literature from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century. I also teach translation from French to English.

Publications

  • 'Uneasy States of Matrimony: Marriage in Transit in Montaigne’s Essais', in Montaigne in Transit: Essays in Honour of Ian Maclean, ed. by Neil Kenny, Richard Scholar and Wes Williams (Oxford: Legenda, 2017), pp. 77-96
  • 'The Hybrid Art of the Compiler: Text/Image Relations in the Ovide moralisé of Colard Mansion', in Text/Image Relations in Late Medieval French and Burgundian Culture, ed. by Rosalind Brown-Grant and Rebecca Dixon (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2015), pp. 143-64
  • 'Irrepressible  Malebouche: Voice, Citation and Polyphony in the Roman de la rose', Cahiers de recherches médiévales 22 (2011), 'Les voix narratives du récit médiéval: Approches linguistiques et littéraires', ed. by Sophie Marnette and Helen Swift, 9-23
  • 'The Lyonnaise Medusa: Louise Labé in the Poetry of Olivier de Magny', Romanic Review, 100.4 (Nov. 2009): 453-472
  • 'Amazonian Knots: Gender, Genre, and Ariosto’s Women Warriors', MLN, 122.1 (2007), 1-23
  • 'Problems of Recognition: The Fallible Narrator and the Female Addressee in Partonopeu de Blois', Mediaevalia, 25.2 (2004), 163-79