I'm a literary scholar who works on literary texts, historical objects, and material culture, mostly in French, but also to an important degree in German. My research explores the boundaries between literature and history, concentrating on eighteenth- through twentieth-century Europe, with a particular focus on the intersections of literature and science; much of it engages with the environmental humanities. Though my work also employs methods taken from history of science and intellectual history, the core of my work remains literary; I'm deeply invested in a literary approach to form as well as to material culture.
I served a term at the Princeton Society of Fellows from 2020 to 2023, and I hold a Ph.D. in French and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, an M.A. in Littératures comparées from Paris IV (Paris-Sorbonne), and a B.A. in English Literature and Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin.
The completed manuscript of my first book is titled From Feuilles to Fossils: Documents of Self and World. It concerns the documentary and research practices of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georg Lichtenberg, Emile Zola, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. Sebald, arguing that they used a variety of materials ranging from diaries, almanacs, research notes, scientific observations, and plant collections as material interfaces that served to record, situate, and indeed constitute their selves among the phenomena of nature and society.
My research on my book has been supported by a Mellon International Humanities Travel Grant, UCRHSS funding from Princeton University, and the ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship. My articles have been published in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Romanic Review, Dix-Neuf, and Eighteenth-Century French World. I'm currently the French Studies book review editor for the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and have reviewed books for French Studies; French Society, Politics, and Culture; Nineteenth-Century French Studies; and soon for Monatshefte.
PUBLICATIONS
“Rousseau’s Herbaria: Leaves of Self, Books of Nature.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 54.2, Winter 2021, 401-425. (Also forthcoming in French translation in the Annales Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 2025.) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/781126/pdf
“Rousseau on the Île de Saint-Pierre: Realism as Circumscription.” Sept. 2022, Romanic Review 113.2, 199-221. https://read.dukeupress.edu/romanic-review/article-abstract/113/2/199/318303/Rousseau-on-the-Ile-Saint-PierreRealism-as?redirectedFrom=fulltext
“Generating Life from Literature: Proust in Balzac’s Aquarium.” Dix-Neuf, 27.4,
(2023), 286-301. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14787318.2023.2228146
“Narrating Humanity: From Graeber & Wengrow to Rousseau.” Contribution to special issue of Le monde français du dix-huitième siècle/Eighteenth-Century
French World, edited by Rachel Carnell. Vol. 9, N° 1, summer 2024. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/mfds-ecfw/article/view/19626
“Chemical Manipulations of Nature: New Social Categories in Diderot’s Encyclopédie.” In French Enlightenment: Repurposing the Past, eds. Hanna Roman and Olivia Sabee, forthcoming 2025 in the series Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment.
