Research Areas

• medieval French and Occitan literature and manuscript culture
• medieval history-writing and theories of temporality
• affect and emotion
• the senses (especially touch and smell)
• philology
• the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière

I'm currently working on two book projects. The first, emerging out of my ERC-funded PhD research, is provisionally entitled The Anachronic Manuscript: Voices, Affect, and Assemblage in a Medieval French History Book. In it, I develop the concept of the anachronic to articulate a new approach to medieval literature and history-writing based on the material object, the manuscript, as opposed to its heuristic abstraction, the text. The Anachronic Manuscript is centred on a thirteenth-century multi-text manuscript made in Soissons, northern France (Paris, BnF, fr. 17177), which I use as a case study to explore broader issues in medieval textuality surrounding voice, polyphony, affect, and assemblages (the respective titles of each chapter).

The second, which won funding from the British Academy, examines the traces of tactile interaction found on medieval French (and some Occitan) manuscripts. With the working title Touch and the Experience of Medieval French Manuscripts, this monograph aims to document the prevalence of a variety of haptic bookish practices in the French-speaking space between 1200 and 1500. Five widely-disseminated thirteenth-century works are examined in over 300 illuminated manuscripts: Roman de Troie, Miracles de Nostre Dame, Lancelot-Grail, Faits des Romains, and Roman de la Rose. The thematic chapters—for now ‘Attachments’, ‘Virtuality’, ‘Ethics’, ‘Politics’, ‘Erotics’, ‘Devotion’, and ‘Time’—work comparatively across my corpus of manuscripts (plus many others) to draw out the implications of touch for the reading experience. I argue that not only does touch provide crucial insight into reader response and the interests of medieval French audiences but also that touch as a theoretical and methodological principle challenges the core assumptions of literary criticism.

Read a recent interview with me here.

Biography

• PhD French, King's College London (2020)
• MA French Literature and Culture, King's College London (2016)
• BA French and History, King's College London (2015)

Prior to joining UC Berkeley, I was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2021–23), a Postdoctoral Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin (2020–21), and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at King's College London (2020).

Selected Publications

(with Giulia Boitani) “A Hospitaller Book in Fifteenth-Century Florence: Notes on the Owners of Cologny, Bodmer 147,” Medioevo Romanzo, 48 (2024, forthcoming).

“Defacing Troy: From Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece to Medieval Manuscripts,” Anglia, 142.3 (2024), 548–72.

(with Andrew James Johnston and Wolfram R. Keller) “Introduction: Touching Troy,” Anglia 142.3 (2024), 419–27. 

“Gautier de Coinci's Miracles de Nostre Dame and the Powers of Olfaction,” New Medieval Literatures, 24 (2024), 60–100.

“Veiled Reading, Reading Veils: Textile Curtains and the Experiences of Medieval French Manuscripts, 1200–1325,” Digital Philology, 12.2 (2023), 155–94.

“The Date, Author, and Context of the Roman de Silence: A Reassessment,” Medium Ævum, 91 (2022), 70–99.

“All Roads Lead to Rome: Revisiting the Pairing of the Histoire ancienne jusqu'à César and the Faits des Romains in the Thirteenth Century,” Romania, 139 (2021), 5–36.

“The Untimely Subject: Reporting Discourse and Bearing Witness in Villehardouin's La Conquête de Constantinople and Yannick Haenel's Jan Karski,” Interfaces, 7 (2020), 9–36. 

The Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César: A Digital Edition; BNF, Fr20125 (interpretive edition): Orient II (8) and Alexander (9), ed. by Henry Ravenhall, Simon Gaunt, Simone Ventura, Maria Teresa Rachetta, Natasha Romanova and Hannah Morcos; technical ed. by Paul Caton, Ginestra Ferraro, Marcus Husar, and Geoffroy Noël.

(For more on my research, please visit my website).