Research
My research centres on seventeenth-century French drama in early modern translation.
My first book, The First English Translations of Molière: Drama in Flux, 1663-1732, explores the ways in which the first translators of the French playwright engaged with the dramatic impact and satirical drive of the source texts and challenges the idea that the plays were straightforwardly plagiarized. It assesses how translated terms relating to the key social themes of cuckoldry, zealotry, medicine and bourgeoisie were chosen to resonate within the new semantic fields in English, a target language which was coming into renewed close contact with French.
I am also interested in the localization techniques of dramatists and adaptors. I have been developing my research on cross-Channel translation to work on forms of inter-regional translation of drama within seventeenth-century France, paying particular attention to modifications made in print editions.
Teaching
I teach a range of authors across the three centuries covered in FHS French Paper VII and Paper X. I enjoy blending my research interests and teaching in French-English translation classes.
Later this academic year I shall lecture on 'Paris and Urbanity in Seventeenth-Century French Comedy'.
Publications
The First English Translations of Molière: Drama in Flux, 1663-1732 (Cambridge: Legenda, 2020)
'Printing Stage: Relationships between performance, print, and translation in early English editions of Molière', Early Modern French Studies, 40.2 (2018), 146-65
Forthcoming:
'Early Modern English Translations of Molière', in Jan Clarke (ed.), Molière in Context, Cambridge Literature in Context Series
"If neither faith nor tears nor means can move': Translating Emotion from Racine's Bérénice (1670) to Otway's Titus and Berenice (1676)', in Nicholas Hammond and Paul Hammond (eds), Racine's Roman Tragedies (Leiden: Brill Rodopi)
Premières «impressions» : publier Molière dans l'Angleterre du premier XVIIIe siècle', Littératures classiques, 'La première réception de Molière dans l'espace européen'(1660-1780), issue edited by Claude Bourqui, Fabrice Chassot and Bénédicte Louvat