A former research fellow of the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS), I am now a Postdoctoral Researcher in Languages, Literatures and Translation Studies (specialised in French Literature and Romance Languages) at the Université libre de Bruxelles/University of Oxford. Following on from my PhD thesis (which focused on literary representations of male prostitutions from 1783 to 1922), I am particularly interested in long-19th-century literatures of French expression, studied in light of gender, queer and sex work History.

Current Research Project: 

(Un)Voicing Male Prostitution during the First Empire and the Bourbon Restoration: An In-Depth Case Study at the Crossroads of Censorship and Gendered Representations in the French Novel (1800-1830).

'According to the conclusions of my doctoral dissertation, there is a significant decline in the number of novels depicting male prostitution from 1800 to 1830. It seems that the then prostitué appeared under the guise of less conspicuous figures, such as the greluchon, the sigisbée, or the parvenu - who would implicitly engage in sexual activity with women, either for money, or for social prestige - in order to evade the First Empire's and the Bourbon Restoration's censorship. This 30-year period now requires a micro-analysis that I have not been able to conduct so far, as the representations of the time have only become meaningful in the light of the macro-study that I carried out in my PhD thesis on the preceding and following political eras (i.e. the French Revolution/the July Monarchy). By considering twenty-five little known, or even unknown novels of manners written between 1800 and 1830, along with theological, medical, legal, and media writings, I will explore the moral intent of early-19th-century fictional narratives in relation to the doxa of the time, which seems to have 'unvoiced' the prostitué, and the role of fiction in renewing the representations of sexuality. Writers from 1800-1830, who themselves are likely to have been inspired by late-18th-century libertine novelists, appear to have influenced the realist literature of the second third of the 19th century (e.g. Honoré de Balzac's work) as well as the imaginary of male prostitution to this day. Having a chance to delve deeper into the origins of the current representations of the prostitué will enable me to build a further research project on the reception of/appropriation of long-19th-century representations of male prostitution today, especially in contemporary sex workers' literary testimonies'.

Latest publication:

Nicolas Duriau, 'Sociabilités homosexuelles et photographiques a l'ère de la reproductibilité technique. Illustrations littéraires dans L’Élu d'Achille Essebac (1902)', Sextant no 40, Intellectuel·les queer. Colaborations 1880-1920 (2023), https://doi.org/10.4000/sextant.2134.