About me

I am currently an Associate Professor in the Department of French and Italian and Affiliated Faculty of the Program in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. I received my B.A. in Comparative Literature and The Creative Writing Program from Columbia University, and my M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. I am a comparatist both by training and by disposition: my research explores figurations of violence in early modern French, English and Italian literature, analyzing rhetorics of suffering and brutality that shape the politics of the early modern Self and State.

I am the author of Love’s Wounds: Violence and the Politics of Poetry in Early Modern Europe (Cornell University Press, 2016). My articles have been published or are forthcoming in L'Esprit Créateur, Cultural Critique, Montaigne Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne (Philippe Desan, ed.), Modern Philology, Modern Language Quarterly, and Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp, eds.).

My work has been supported by numerous fellowships and awards. I was awarded an AT&T Research Fellowship by Northwestern University for 2018-2019 and 2019-2020. I held the Monticello College Foundation Fellowship at the Newberry Library in the 2018-2019 academic year. In 2017-2018 I was a Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University, and a Public Voices Thought Leadership Fellow. I held the Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Fellowship for a blissful year at the Huntington Library in 2012-2013. I was honoured to receive Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award in 2011-2012.