About
Welcome to my webpage. I am an interdisciplinary scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature. I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of French at Williams College, where I teach in the Romance Languages Department.
My broad research agenda concerns how affect and emotions shape literary form and politics in relation to the historical traumas of the twentieth century and their aftermath. In my first book project, Disaffection: A Literary History from Ernaux to Camus, I examine how writers mobilized disaffection ( désaffection ) to respond to ethical and political forms of violence, from the period of the Vichy regime to the beginning of the twenty-first century. My second research project addresses questions of belonging and solidarity in twentieth-century diasporic writings of the Mediterranean, focusing especially on Jewish and Black émigré writers in Marseille. I am also interested in Francophone Sephardic literature, especially from Marseille and the Mediterranean. My publications have appeared in Revue des lettres modernes, L’esprit créateur, and French Studies.
Prior to Williams College, I taught at Centre College and Northwestern University, from which I also received my PhD, conferred jointly by the Comparative Literary Studies Program and the Department of French and Italian. I also studied at the École Normale Supérieure as a pensionnaire étrangère and at Kingston University's Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy in the U.K., where I received a master's in continental philosophy. Previously, I studied art history at the Free University of Brussels, where I received my undergraduate degree and did an exchange at the University of Washington in Seattle.