I am a Lecturer on French Literature at Harvard, where I received my Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures in May 2021. I graduated with an AB in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College in 2011 and studied for a year at the ENS Lyon before starting work on my doctoral degree at Harvard in 2012. I also spent a year on fellowship as a pensionnaire étranger at the ENS, rue d'Ulm in Paris.
My research focuses on extremes of feeling in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century French and Francophone literature, and literature’s relationship with the visual arts, aesthetics, and critical theory. My current project, Intimate Catastrophe, explores how the contemplation of aesthetic objects – photography, paintings, works of architecture – is interwoven with the work of mourning as a way to mediate the pain of an irreparable loss by inscribing it in a genealogy of looking that extends beyond the individual. Case studies on the work of Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes, and Hervé Guibert examine canonical writings on loss in dialogue with lesser known texts and minor writings on aesthetics in order to reveal the centrality of aesthetic thought to their narrative, theoretical, and intimate representations of mourning.
My research and teaching interests include: nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century French and Francophone literature; Proust; memory; media and visual culture (photography, architecture, painting); autobiographical writing; affect studies and the history of emotions; LGBTQ writing; theater and performance; critical theory (“French theory,” queer and feminist theory, and psychoanalytic theory).