Since 2022, I have been a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

My research has two tracks, emerging from my training in the intellectual history of early modern Europe, and in philosophy. Both tracks are united by asking questions about the political and moral effects of literature.

1/ My first book manuscript, Ethical Icons: Sketching Character in Early Modern Europe (under contract with Harvard University Press), examines a genre that finds itself at the crossroads between literature, moral philosophy and the social sciences: the character type. Starting with its emergence in ancient Greece, in the work of Aristotle’s student, Theophrastus, the manuscript recovers the ethical and political work of this central literary device. Working on materials in ancient Greek, Latin, English and French, it shows how sketches of ordinary vices––from bad timing to flattery––were used to instil virtue in Hellenistic Athens, Lutheran Europe and seventeenth-century France. It reveals how this genre, when adapted by a crowd of anonymous writers during the English Civil War, furnished social knowledge of types in a moment of political crisis. This is a story that reaches its end in the work of David Hume, who argues that philosophers should move away from sketching characters, towards finding principles, bringing about the separation of moral philosophy from what we now call "literature."

2/ My new book project, Beyond Liberal Aesthetics, takes many of the questions of this study into new terrain, investigating how liberal philosophers, from Adam Smith to Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty, develop a shared conception of literature's political and moral role, a phenomenon we might call "liberal aesthetics." This project asks whether this is the right way to understand the public import of the arts. As part of this project, I have written about contemporary authors, like the novelist Rachel Cusk, and am beginning to investigate contemporary approaches to socialist aesthetics, in contrast. 

Together, I consider my research agenda––situated between aesthetics and political theory––under the framework of political aesthetics.

Alongside academia, I have been lucky enough to work as a dramaturg, on projects that ranged from multilingual Shakespeare, to verbatim political theatre, in collaboration with the National Center for Performing Arts in Beijing, Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, the Grange Festival of Opera, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. 

Books

  • Ethical Icons: Sketching Character in Early Modern Europe (under contract with Harvard University Press)
  • En deçà du bien et du mal. Morales de la littérature de la Renaissance à l’âge contemporain [On this Side of Good and Evil. Morality and Literature from the Renaissance to the Contemporary]. Co-edited volume with Barbara Carnevali and Emiliano Cavaliere (under contract with Éditions Hermann, forthcoming March 2024)

Recent articles 

  • "A Critique of Martha Nussbaum’s Liberal Aesthetics." Political Theory, OnlineFirst
  • “The Study of National Character in Seventeenth-Century London: From Satire to Social Science.” Intersezioni: Review of the History of Ideas 43, no. 1 (2023): 39–60.
  • “Theophrastus’ ‘Oligarch’ and the Political Intention of the Characters.” Co-authored with René de Nicolay. Cambridge Classical Journal 69 (Dec 2023).
  • “Moral Instruction by Bad Example. The First Latin Translations of Theophrastus’ Characters.” Renaissance Studies 36, no. 5 (2022): 668–85.
  • “Did Theophrastus Help Deliver Eresus from Tyrants?” Classical Quarterly 72, no. 1 (2022): 1–10.

Reviews and shorter pieces

  • “Introduction: Genre Trouble in Early Modern English Writing (1500-1800).” Co-authored with Emma Bartel. Sillages critiques 34 (2023).
  • “Book Review: A Glitch in the Matrix: Vivek Chibber and the Cultural Turn.” Philosophy and Social Criticism (2023), OnlineFirst.
  • “Rachel Cusk and the Search for Moral Fiction.” Iride. Journal of Philosophy and Public Debate 35, no. 97 (Sept-Dec, 2022), 645–50.
  • “Losing the Plot (And Finding It Again),” Contemporary Theatre Review 30, no. 3 (2020): 419–21.

Areas of focus

  • Political aesthetics
  • Political emotions 
  • Philosophy of literature 
  • Ethics and literature 
  • Early modern intellectual history
  • Genres of philosophy  

Education

  • PhD. Queen Mary University of London, Intellectual History, 2022.
  • M2. École Normale Supérieure, Paris, Philosophy, 2020.
  • MSt. University of Oxford, English (1550–1700), 2018.
  • MA. Columbia University, Political Science, Political Theory, 2016.
  • BA. University of Oxford, English Language and Literature, 2014.