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Introduction

I attended the local comprehensive school (The Arnewood School in New Milton) before earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Philosophy at the University of Southampton. I then combined full-time work in the Modern Languages Department at Southampton with completing an MPhil focused on nineteenth-century philosophy. In 2017, I was appointed to a PhD position in Philosophical Aesthetics at Uppsala University in Sweden. During my doctoral studies, I worked as an Editorial Assistant at the British Journal of Aesthetics, was a visiting researcher at Birkbeck College and Auburn University, and received Essay Prizes from the European Society for Aesthetics (2020) and the British Society for Aesthetics (2024). I was subsequently a postdoc in the Department of Literature and Rhetoric at Uppsala University. In September 2025, I returned to the UK to take up my current position at Queen’s University.

Teaching

I teach the ‘Logic’, ‘General Philosophy’ and ‘Moral Philosophy’ first-year papers at Queen’s as well as the ‘Ethics’ finals paper.

Research

My primary research project focuses on philosophical aesthetics and draws on work in the history of philosophy, value theory, epistemology, and normative theory. It revolves around two currently neglected claims with a venerable historical lineage. First, that objects bearing aesthetic value demand that we cognitively explore them on their own terms and for their own sake as the distinct individuals they are. Second, that intelligible beauty is the highest form of aesthetic value. I intend to develop a comprehensive account of aesthetic value and aesthetic normativity from these two claims.

I also work on the philosophy of honesty and nineteenth-century philosophy. In a secondary research project, I argue for a particular view of honesty: to be honest is to strive to live—and succeed in living—in harmony with the truth.

Publications

  • Page, J. (forthcoming) Winner of the British Society of Aesthetics Essay Prize 2024 ‘Artistic Honesty’, British Journal of Aesthetics.
  • Page, J. (forthcoming) ‘Aesthetic Communication’, Ergo
  • Page, J. (2024) ‘Nietzsche contra Schopenhauer on Art and Truth’,The Monist, Vol. 107, Issue 4, October 2024, Pages 378–392, https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onae021

A full list of my publications can be found here

Introduction

I am a Career Development Fellow in Economics at Queen’s College, Oxford University. I
hold a B.A. in Economics with Honors from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Economics
from Brown University.

Teaching

I teach tutorials in macroeconomics for both Prelims and the Core course, as well as in the Economics of Developing Countries.

Research

My research delves into the connections between cultural diversity, human capital
formation, and income inequality, investigating how historical and societal influences shape economic trajectories. A key focus of my work is the cultural foundations of human capital formation in Sub-Saharan Africa and the deep factors that contribute to variations in cultural diversity and income inequality across different societies.

Publications

A full list of my publications can be found here

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 am pleased to be returning to Oxford in 2024 to take up the position of Stipendiary Lecturer in French at Queen’s.

Teaching

I teach French literature of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries to first- and second- year students of French (Papers III, IV, and VIII), as well as literary translation and critical theory. For Paper VIII (the second-year period paper), I encourage students to read across a range of literary works written 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, modernity, ecology, 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. 1944–1979) deal with the promises and devastations of an advancing modernity. My PhD 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) – I argued 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 explore the notion that the postwar period in metropolitan France was marked by an historically unprecedented set of conditions for living well. Through the close reading of literary fiction, I am seeking to recover structures of feeling whose relation to major historico-philosophical concepts – optimism, solidarity, coloniality (e.g.) – challenge the historiographical commonplace according to which France experienced ‘thirty glorious years’ after the war.

Introduction

I grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from downtown Manhattan. I completed a BA in Comparative Literature and History of Art and Architecture at Brown University in 2015, followed by an MPhil in European and Comparative Literatures and Cultures at the University of Cambridge in 2016. I spent two years teaching high school history in Connecticut before returning to Cambridge to pursue a PhD in French with funding from the Gates Cambridge Scholarship programme. I joined Queen’s as a Career Development Fellow in French in the autumn of 2022.

Teaching

I teach French Literature, with a focus on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, across the first-year course and FHS. I also teach translation into English.

Research

My research demonstrates a preoccupation with the relationship between communication and power in early modern French literature. My first monograph, developed from my doctoral thesis, explores Michel de Montaigne’s conception in the Essais of the mechanics of communication, as well as the ways communication influences and is influenced by social and political structures. Adopting a theoretical approach rooted in pragmatic language philosophy, with a particular focus on relevance theory’s cognitively-inflected account of utterance interpretation, the book examines Montaigne’s portrayals of communication in four contexts: conversation and civility, diplomacy, jurisprudence, and prayer and exegesis. The sustained use of a pragmatic framework to analyse Montaigne’s evocations of seemingly disparate communicative domains, typically treated separately by intellectual history, reveals patterns in his thinking that traverse these domains.

My next project, provisionally entitled ‘“Ces mots semblent être des charmes”: Speech, Authority, and Force in the Tragedies of Corneille and Racine’, explores the instrumentality of authoritative speech in seventeenth-century French tragedy. Homing in on the speech of monarchs and oracles in particular, it considers how these figures take advantage of, or circumvent, communicative conventions to influence and construct social and political realities. A pragmatics-oriented analysis of forceful speech offers a new means of comparing and contrasting the canonical works of Corneille and Racine. The project also incorporates works by their contemporaries, including Catherine Bernard and Jean Rotrou, to offer an analysis of how monarchical and oracular speech operate in the broader realm of seventeenth-century theatrical theory and practice.

Publications

Communication, Relevance, and Power in Montaigne’s Essais (Legenda, 2025), ISBN: 978-1-839543-43-2

‘”Il guigne seulement du doigt par où nous irons”: Underspecification in Montaigne’s Essais‘, Modern Language Review 118.3 (2023), pp. 328-348. https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2023.a901111. 

 ‘“Le plus fructueux et naturel exercise de nostre esprit”: Conversation et domaine public dans les œuvres de Montaigne, Guazzo, et Castiglione’, Bulletin de la Societé internationale des amis de Montaigne, 73 (2021), pp. 199-212.

‘A Message from the Margins: The Role of the Infante in Corneille’s Le Cid’, French Studies, 74.4(2020), pp. 519-535. https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knaa166.

 ‘Words, Meaning and Force: The Placebo Effect in Montaigne’s Essais and Vair’s Des Charmes’, Montaigne Studies 29 (2017), pp. 213-224.

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