Fields
French Early Modern Studies
Emotion and Affect Studies
Materialities and Print Culture
Early Modern Women Writers
Education & Training
- PhD, University of Pennsylvania
Representative Publications
Absolutist Attachments: Emotion, Media, and Absolutism in Seventeenth-Century France (Evenston: Northwestern University Press, 2019)
"New Perspectives on Early Modern Philosophy: Elisabeth of Bohemia and Descartes, Scudery and Pascal." Options for Teaching Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers, MLA Options for Teaching Series, ed. Faith Beasley. (forthcoming)
"The Power of Frivolity: Villedieu, La Force, and the Nouvelle historique." Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature. Ed. Rainer Zaiser. (forthcoming)
"Useful Wounds." EMF: Studies in Early Modern France. Eds. Anne L. Birberick and Russell J. Ganim. 12 (2008).
"Pour une esthétique des tablettes: Clélie et les tablettes à écrire au XVIIe siècle." Seventeenth-Century French Studies 28 (2006): 117-33.
"Jouissance, or Villedieu's Art of Pleasing." Formes et formations au dix-septième siècle. Ed. Buford Norman. 168 (2006): 39-50.
"War Relations: A Journalist Writes the Sun King's Wars." Relations & Relationships in Seventeenth-Century French Literature. Ed. Jennifer R. Perlmutter. PFSCL/Biblio 17 166. Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 2006. 197-208.
Research Interests
Seventeenth-century France has been called the Age of Reason and the Age of Absolutism, but it was the age of emotion as well. Descartes claimed the passions as a distinctly modern field of inquiry; Charles Le Brun taught artists how to draw emotions; and Madeleine de Scudéry redrew the map of human relations in the Carte de Tendre. My current book project studies this affective revolution in the context of the birth of print news (the first periodicals in France date from the 1600s). In today’s age where new media creates new affective relationships to power—when we can “friend” (and unfriend) our presidents or follow their tweets—it behooves us to consider the intertwining of emotion and information, affect and media, that defined the early modern subject of absolutism. My new project takes me from media to materiality. From unruly matter on the classical stage (blushing swords and disappearing walls) to the talking coins, birds, flowers, and trees that fill volumes of gallant poetry, what kinds of relationships to the material world does early modern literature navigate, uphold, or subvert? And what happens when we bring the messiness of materiality to the disembodied elegance of French classicism? As a spin-off to this project, I am co-organizing a faculty-graduate workshop at the University of Pittsburgh on “Premodern Elements”: earth, wind, air, and fire.