Introduction
Having attended my local comprehensive school and sixth-form college, I read History and French at St Hilda’s College, Oxford (2013–17), followed by a MSt in French at St Catherine’s College, Oxford (2019) and a PhD in French at Clare College, Cambridge (2019–23). I returned to Oxford in 2024 as a Stipendiary Lecturer at Queen’s and in 2025 took on the position of Career Development Fellow.
Teaching
I teach literature of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries to students of French (Prelims Papers III and IV; FHS Papers VIII, XI, and XIV), as well as literary translation and critical theory. My teaching draws on a range of literary and intellectual materials produced in French since the revolutionary upheavals of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. In tutorials, I am particularly interested to explore how contemporary critical concerns (e.g. analyses of coloniality/colonialism, capitalism, ecology, technology, and gender) change the ways in which we understand literary history, and what happens to those concerns when they pass through sustained analysis of literary texts and their contexts.
Research
My research investigates how novels published at the centre of the collapsing French empire (c. 1944–1981) deal with the promises and devastations of advancing modernity. My PhD (2024) argued that experiments with the French novel between 1957 and 1966 configured everyday life as a ground of human existence and a resource for ethical enquiry. Through close readings of four novels – Michel Butor’s La Modification (1957), Georges Perec’s Les Choses (1965), Nathalie Sarraute’s Le Planétarium (1959), and Marguerite Duras’s Le Vice-Consul (1966) – the thesis argues for the significance of narrative fiction in the development of a conceptual history of everyday life, and particularly for its capacity to reflect on the conditions of possibility for thinking ethics through everydayness.
My postdoctoral project will attempt to reckon with the significance of the postwar period (c. 1944–1981) in metropolitan France, not least as the historical foil against which the subsequent historical epoch has been understood. The project will investigate how an historically unprecedented set of conditions for living well emerged in relation to the transformation of longstanding structures of violence and exploitation. Through the close reading of literary fiction, the project aims to recover structures of feeling whose relation to major historico-philosophical concepts – optimism, solidarity, coloniality, alienation (e.g.) – challenge the historiographical commonplace according to which France experienced ‘thirty glorious years’ after the war, and to explore the implications for a critical understanding of the neoliberal era in the moment of its own supercession.