Rebecca is a third-year DPhil candidate at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and one of the co-convenors for Queer Intersections Oxford for 2024-25.

Her thesis looks at the intersections of esotericism and identity in the works of lesbian French poet Renée Vivien (1877-1909). Her main areas of interest are French-, English- and Russian-language literature of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, with an emphasis on queer theory, reception, and subjectivity.

Prior to this, she completed a BA in French and Beginners' Russian at Oxford (2019) and a Masters in Comparative Literature at Sorbonne Université (2022), where she produced two Masters dissertations on the verse and prose works of Renée Vivien, Sophia Parnok, and Oscar Wilde. 

She has also been involved in a number of Digital Humanities projects, including the digitisation of the registers of the Comédie-Française under Florence Naugrette (2022) and the transcription of Renée Vivien's teenage diaries (ongoing).

Conference & Seminar Papers

• ‘“Every Saint has a Past, Every Sinner has a Future”: Queer Hagiographies of fin-de-siècle Paris,’ Producing and Receiving the Nineteenth Century (Semicentennial NCFS Colloquium), Duke (19/09/2024).
• ‘“Tu subiras éternellement le sortilège du passé”: Renée Vivien's Queer Bodies in the Grip of Queer Time,’ 66th Annual Conference of the Society for French Studies, Stirling (2/07/2024).
• ‘Written in the Stars? Renée Vivien's Poetic Cosmology of Gender,’  French Graduate Research Seminar, Cambridge (23/05/2024).
• ‘Here Be Lesbians: Sex, Blood, and the Peripheries of Empire in 19th-Century Tales of Sapphic Lust,’ Queer Intersections Oxford Research Lunch, Oxford (7/05/2024).
• ‘Monsters Out of the Closet? Nightmarish Lesbian Identity in fin-de-siècle France,’ French Graduate Seminar, Oxford (17/10/2023).
• ‘Paradoxes de la création littéraire chez Renée Vivien, la “Muse aux Violettes,”’ Colloque Muses, Égéries, Pygmalions, Bordeaux-Montaigne (26/04/2023).
• ‘“Quelle est cette femme damnée ?” Witchcraft as a blueprint for lesbian existence in the poetry of Renée Vivien,’ Magic: Enchantment and Disenchantment (21st Annual Conference of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes), Oxford (27/03/2023).

Publications

• ‘Spectral Selfhood in Sapphic Nightmares of the Belle Époque’ in Frances Clemente and Greta Colombani (ed.), Nightmares in the Long Nineteenth Century, London, Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming).
• ‘Renée Vivien, enfant terrible of the Belle Époque?’, Taylor Institution Library: A Bodleian Libraries Weblog (12/04/2024).
• ‘Sophia Parnok, Russia's First Lesbian Poet,’ Queer Nineteen (16/08/2023).

Public Engagement

• Curator of the ‘Renée Vivien, enfant terrible of the Belle Époque?’ exhibition at the Taylor Institution (22/04/2024-2/05/2024).