My work examines the entangled histories of literature and the French empire, especially related to the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am interested in genre and adaptation, material culture, affect and critical race studies, and the histories of colonialism, abolitionism, and antislavery.

I am writing a book about how literary adaptations served as spaces for racial formation, and thus how literature contributed to the construction of race. My research on the first French poetry contest to attempt a commemoration of the abolition of the trade of captive Africans appears in Nineteenth-Century French Studies. My article on Édouard Glissant and reactions to French imperial monuments (ranging from decay to decapitation) can be found in Nineteenth-Century Contexts. My chapter on the colonial contexts of the first versions of the “Beauty and the Beast” fairy tale by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont is included in Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy (ed. Jérôme Brillaud and Virginie Greene). I also served as editorial assistant to Andrew Sobanet for the essay collection, Revisioning French Culture (Liverpool University Press, 2019).

I am currently an Assistant Professor of French in the Department of Comparative International Studies at San Diego State University. I hold a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. I am a current faculty affiliate of the Digital Humanities Center at SDSU and Web Editor of the H-France Forum. From 2017–2019, I was affiliated with the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (Rue d’Ulm) as a Pensionnaire Étrangère. As Digital Collections Fellow in French Studies at Widener Library (Harvard University), I curated content for the France in the Americas digital humanities project, in partnership with the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

My research has been supported by the Georges Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust, the Société des professeurs français et francophones d’Amérique, and the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.

If you’re interested in learning more about my work, please feel free to be in touch.