I am a second-year D.Phil. candidate working on 15th- and 16th-century French literature, culture, and history. In the 2024-25 academic year, I am a Visiting Scholar in the Department of History at Princeton University, where I hold the Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship.
My doctoral thesis, funded by the Besse Scholarship, explores the craft of anthology-making by looking closely at the history of one country––France––over the course of three remarkable decades, roughly 1500 to 1530. This under-studied period, situated at a juncture between the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, saw an explosion in the production of poetry anthologies. These volumes appeared under various names: jardins, fleurs, recueils, œuvres. Through in-depth case studies of individual manuscripts and early printed books, I argue that anthologies have significant implications for our understandings of national identity, literary history, and canon formation. Authors in my corpus include more canonical ones such as George Chastelain, Jean Molinet, and Jean Lemaire de Belges, lesser-known poets like Guillaume Cretin and André de La Vigne, as well as numerous minor poets or anonymous ‘others’.
Alongside my doctoral work, I am currently Research Assistant on the John Fell-funded project ‘La Chastelaine de Vergi: Encounters in Medieval Literary Space' (2023–25), co-led by Prof. Sophie Marnette and Prof. Helen Swift.
In a public engagement context, I am strongly committed to dismantling the barriers and inequities that block access to higher education. Before coming to Oxford as a first-generation student, I was educated at state comprehensive schools in Barnsley and Rotherham, South Yorkshire. I regularly deliver academic taster sessions and talks for students from non-selective state schools and colleges. My project at Princeton focuses on using medieval manuscripts as interdisciplinary teaching tools to support widening participation in the arts and humanities. You can read more about it here.
Research interests
- 15th- and 16th-century French literature, culture, and history
- Anthologies and mise en recueil
- Manuscript materiality, early print culture, book history
- The ‘nonhuman turn’, especially affect theory and media archaeology
- Community-engaged scholarship and histories of pedagogy
Teaching
- FHS Paper XII: New Ecologies: Plants, Stones, Robots
- English to French Translation
- French to English Translation
- French Sole Prelims: Introduction to Literary Theory
- French Prelims: Narrative Fiction
Peer-reviewed publications
'Cretin imprimé. Le recueil des Traictez singuliers de Galliot Du Pré (1526)', Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes, 42.1 (2024), 243–264. [here]
'Bodies, Temporalities and Archives: Literary and Filmic Production after the 2010 Haitian Earthquake', French Studies Bulletin, 44.166 (2023), 1–11. **Winner of the Society for French Studies R. Gapper Undergraduate Essay Prize 2021/22. [available Open Access here]
Books reviews
'Fleurs et jardins de poésie: les anthologies poétiques au XVIe siècle (domaine français, incursions européennes). Sous la direction d’Adeline Lionetto et Jean-Charles Monferran', French Studies, 78.2 (2024), 326–327. [here]
'"Bon pays de France": enjeu national et joutes poétiques sous le règne de François Ier. Par Nina Mueggler', French Studies (2024). [here]
Recent conference papers
'Composing Poetry, Navigating Oceans: Jean Parmentier’s Blue Poetics', MLA Convention, New Orleans, January 2025.
–– with Adrian Armstrong, 'La Normandie rétro? La poésie tardomédiévale imprimée à Rouen de 1540 à 1600', Colloque international de la SFDES: La culture médiévale à la Renaissance, Université de Rouen, October 2024.
'"Qu'on luy retient une demye année": Wage Cuts, Strike Action, and the Politics of Precarity in Late-Medieval Francophone Poetry', part of the panel Premodern Precarities, Society for French Studies 65th Annual Conference, University of Stirling, July 2024.
'Court Poetry in the Print Shop, or How to Make an Œuvre (with Michel Foucault)', International Courtly Literature Seminar, Trinity College Dublin, June 2024
'Premodern Anthologising as Resistance', Cambridge French Graduate Research Seminar, University of Cambridge, May 2024.