Profile

The primary focus of my research and teaching is late medieval and early modern French literature and culture. Secondary specializations include medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, the classical tradition, and gender and sexuality studies. Research in rare book and manuscript collections is central to my scholarship and has been facilitated by fellowships at Villa I Tatti, Harvard University’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy (2009-10) and at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC (2010-11). Some of my archival discoveries have led to their own dedicated studies. This is the case, for example, with my identification of a hitherto unknown sixteenth-century manuscript of Étienne de La Boétie’s "Discours de la servitude volontaire." Fundamentally, however, my archive fever is sparked by current critical questions; drawing together diverse approaches ranging from book history and reception studies to queer theory and intellectual history, my scholarship aspires to bridge the divide between philology and hermeneutics. 

My first book, Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France (Ashgate, 2008), was organized around a much-discussed topic, namely Montaigne’s textual relationship with his beloved friend Étienne de La Boétie. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s accounts of critique, governmentality and the care of the self, I expanded the ambit of earlier reflections on friendship and voluntary servitude in part by addressing La Boétie’s idiosyncratic translations of Plutarch’s The Rules of Marriage and Xenophon’s On Household Management; rethinking the question of Montaigne’s politics in the Essais as well as the anxiety of influence model often used to characterize his emergence as an author; and considering Marie de Gournay’s writings and editorial practices. In conversation with Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, I also offered an alternate genealogy of the friendship tradition highlighting women’s contested place in it as well as ambivalence about classical pederasty. 

My second book project, The Uses of Desire in Early Modern Italy and France,  explores how theories and representations of desire were (and indeed often still are) linked to questions of utility or productivity broadly construed, with particular attention to the reception of classical antiquity. Chapters address the politics of Louis le Roy’s Sympose de Platon and other Renaissance translations of and commentaries on Plato’s Symposium; commentaries on and translations of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass; the epistemology of female same-sex desire in Brantôme’s Dames galantes and Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans; lesbian philology beyond the tribade in commentaries on Martial and Juvenal; friendship, sex and tyranny in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron and Benedetto Varchi’s Storia Fiorentina; and the politics of pederasty in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata and the epic tradition.

Other ongoing projects on which I have already published focus on the ideological work performed by late medieval and early modern translations and editions of classical friendship texts in Italy and France and the illustrations in editions of Apuleius’ _The Golden Ass_. On the distant horizon is a project about French and Italian engagements with the Ottoman Empire.