The Society for Early Modern French Studies currently comprises over one hundred academics based in the UK, as well as North America and continental Europe. Our members represent a range of disciplines and historical periods, as well as the full spectrum of academic career stages. Here you will find a directory of some of our members, their institutions, and key research interests.
Dr Allison Adler Inglis-Taylor (University of Oxford): Diplomacy; Bourbon-Habsburg geopolitical rivalry; Baroque and Rococo art; opera and politics.
Ms Elizabeth Apps (University of Oxford): Renaissance French literature; devotional literature; cognitive approaches to literature; theological approaches to literature.
Dr Joanna Barker (University of Durham): Early modern women’s writing; education; translation.
Dr Benedetta Bartolini (IHRIM, Université St Etienne): Theatre; music; tragedy; opera; Quinault; Lully; Racine.
Professor Hélène Bilis (Wellesley College): Theatre; historiography; Corneille; Racine; Molière; troupes; Lafayette; translation.
Professor Mette Birkedal Bruun (University of Copenhagen): Early modern devotion, the history of privacy, monasticism.
Miss Juliette Bowen (University of Cambridge): Sixteenth-century French literature; Renaissance literature; poetics and rhetoric; prefatory writing; Barthélemy Aneau.
Dr Jérôme Brillaud (University of Manchester): Garden history, environmental humanities, early modern technical writing.
Dr Emily Butterworth (King’s College London): Sixteenth-century literature and culture; offensive and deviant language; scandal and gossip; Marguerite de Navarre; discourses of tolerance.
Dr Michael Call (Brigham Young University, USA): Early modern comedy; history of the book; cultural representations of chance, probability, and risk.
Professor Marie-Claude Canova-Green (Goldsmiths, University of London): Seventeenth-century culture and society; court entertainments; civic pageantry; the royal body.
Dr Emma Claussen (Trinity College, Cambridge): Life; science; history of ideas; politics.
Professor Claire Carlin (University of Victoria, BC, Canada): Seventeenth-century theatre (especially Corneille); representations of early modern marriage; the medallic history of the reign of Louis XIV.
Professor Derval Conroy (University College Dublin): 17th-century literature, history of ideas and political thought; women philosophers; Marie de Gournay; Gabrielle Suchon; queenship; the history of equality; women dramatists; print culture; text and image relations; peritexts; festival books; early modern ceremonial.
Dr Alexandra Corey (Trinity College Dublin): Early-modern Savoy; sixteenth-century French and Neo-Latin; court poetry.
Dr Caitlin Dahl (University of Tennessee, Knoxville): Queerness; galanterie; gender & sexuality; accommodation; femininity; critical pre-modern race studies.
Mr Malte Damgaard Hansen (Universitetet i Oslo): Environmental humanities, blue humanities
Professor Jennifer J. Davis (University of Oklahoma): Libertines; Histories of gender and sexuality; Francophone world.
Professor Anne Duprat (Université de Picardie-Jules Verne / Institut Universitaire de France): Comparative Literature; Theory of Fiction; Early Modern Cultural Transfers
Dr Brendan Ezvan (University of Pittsburgh): Material culture; affect; environmental humanities.
Dr Emma Gilby (University of Cambridge): Seventeenth-century philosophy (especially Descartes); early modern receptions of classical rhetoric and poetics; the history of critical practice.
Miss Caroline Godard (University of California, Berkeley): Rabelais; feminism; historiography; economics; genre.
Miss Rebekah Goodchild (University of Oxford): Jansenism; theatre; polemics; quarrels; print culture.
Dr Jessica Goodman (University of Oxford): Eighteenth-century literature; posterity; glory; authorial self-fashioning; theatre; Franco-Italian exchange; sociological approaches to literature.
Dr Oriane Guiziou-Lamour (University of Virginia): Libertinism; eighteenth-century literature; women’s erotic writings; Directoire literature.
Professor Paul Hammond FBA (University of Leeds, School of English): French tragedy (especially Corneille and Racine). See https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/62/professor-paul-hammond
Professor Joseph Harris (Royal Holloway, University of London): 17th-century theatre, 18th-century theatre, comparative literature, Corneille.
Dr Emma Herdman (University of St Andrews): Sixteenth-century literature and culture; classical reception; attitudes to transgression and restraint; women’s writing; birds.
Dr Adam Horsley (University of Exeter): Libertinage (especially Théophile de Viau and François Maynard); subversive texts and the criminal justice system; Law and Literature; political and legal history; material bibliography; manuscript culture.
Professor Katherine Ibbett (University of Oxford): Late sixteenth to late seventeenth-century literature and culture; emotions and affects; environmental humanities in general and water in particular; the French Americas.
Dr Marc W. S. Jaffré (University of Groningen): Princely courts; marginalization; hospitality; diplomacy.
Dr Suzanne Jones (University of Cambridge): Seventeenth-century French theatre; Molière in English translation; plays in print; regionalization in drama.
Ms Emily Kent (University of Edinburgh): Seventeenth-century France; history of science; intellectual history; religious orders; Marin Mersenne.
Professor Neil Kenny (University of Oxford): Early modern French literature and thought (especially from the early sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century); families of writers / scholars; the relation of literature and learning to social hierarchy in early modern France.
Dr Heather Kirk (Western University): Tragedy; preclassical era; rumour; gossip; authorship.
Professor Jean Leclerc (Western University): Seventeenth Century; Poetry; Comedy; Parody; Rhetoric; Scarron.
Professor Lise Leibacher-Ouvrard (University of Arizona): French literature and culture (17th century); cultural and gender studies (17th-18th centuries); early-modern and feminist utopias / utopianism; libertinism and politics; medical, confessional and literary discourses on gender and sexuality; travel literature and colonial writing.
Dr Dana Lungu (University of Bristol): Seventeenth-century French tragedy (Racine, Corneille, Longepierre); female tragic characters (Phèdre, Médée, Clytemnestre); women and violence (infanticide, parricide, incest); social norms and beliefs with regard to violent female crimes; performance and classical reception.
Dr David McCallam (University of Sheffield): eighteenth-century French literature; early modern environmental humanities in France and Europe; French Revolution.
Dr Michael Meere (Wesleyan University): 16th- and 17th-century theatre and performance; representations of violence; gender and sexuality; visual culture.
Mrs Hajer Mestaysser (Université de Lorraine): Literature, society and history of seventeenth-century France.
Professor Michael Moriarty (University of Cambridge): Intellectual history; moral, religious, and social ideas; moralists; Descartes; Pascal; tragedy.
Dr. Sarah Nelson (University of Idaho): Women’s life writing; translation.
Dr Annalisa Nicholson (University of Oxford): Early modern literature and culture, especially women’s writing; seventeenth-century French salons; Huguenots; exile communities; the early modern reception of Lucretius and Epicurus.
Professor John O’Brien (University of Durham): Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French literature; Montaigne and La Bóetie inside and outside France; French seditious and controversial literature in Early Modern Europe; libraries and collectors in France and England; the influence of classical literature and thought.
Dr Luke O’Sullivan (University of Oxford):Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and thought; doubt and uncertainty; precarity; franchise, freedom, and free speech; Montaigne; imitation and authorship.
Dr Jennifer Oliver (Harvard University): Sixteenth-century literature and culture; history of topoi, metaphors, and other forms of analogy; history of science and technology; (eco-)critical approaches to the nature/culture divide.
Professor Henry Phillips (University of Manchester): 17th-century literature and religious culture.
Dr Síofra Pierse (UCD Dublin): Eighteenth-century literature and history of ideas (the early-modern Self; Truth; Doubt); Voltairean historiography; early-modern female-authored French novelists (Tencin; Riccoboni; Graffigny; Charrière; Gougles; Staël); the city in eighteenth-century French literature.
Professor Julia Prest (University of St Andrews): early-modern French and Caribbean theatre, including ballet and opera; theatre and slavery in Saint-Domingue.
Dr. Alexander Roose (Ghent University): French early modern literature and thought; Montaigne, Pascal.
Mr Jamie Rush (University of Virginia):17th and 18th century French and Francophone literature; Francois Fénelon; Les Aventures de Télémaque; Enlightenment philosophy; the 18th century French novel.
Ms Priscilla Scarpaci (University of Georgia): Opera; Lully; Quinault; Saintonge; préciosité.
Professor Marc Schachter (Durham University): Montaigne, La Boétie, Comparative Literature, Sexuality, Gender, Translation, Editing, Classical Reception, Friendship, Sedition, Politics.
Professor Richard Scholar (Durham University): Early modern French literature and thought; Montaigne; theories of keywords, linguistic structures and literary forms; ‘untranslatable’ French terms in English cultural contexts.
Dr Katherine Stratton (University of St Andrews): Sixteenth-century literature and culture; history of practical horsemanship, particularly in an educational context; environmental humanities; cosmography; esotericism and prophetic writing; Guillaume Postel.
Dr Helena Taylor (University of Exeter): Seventeenth-century literature and culture; classical reception (particularly Ovid); quarrels; women’s cultural practice.
Dr Rowan Tomlinson (University of Bristol): Early-modern literary, intellectual, and cultural history; history of poetics and rhetoric; classical reception; history of disciplines; history of education; reception of Italian humanism in France.
Professor Wes Williams (University of Oxford): Early modern French literature and culture; monstrosity and humanimality; servitude and agency in love and politics; displacement, colonisation, and translation; performance.
Dr Emilia Wilton-Godberfforde (University of Cambridge): Theatre.
Professor Thomas Worcester, S.J. (Fordham University): Jesuits; preaching; new France.