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In previous roles, I have taught a range of French language and content courses. These include compulsory French language, translation, modules on photography and theories of the self, French national identity and visual culture, and modernity and the city of Paris.

Research Interests:

My primary research interests lie in the intersections of human bodies, technology and science in the cultures of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Europe. Although always rooted in French studies, my research has taken on a more transnational aspect in recent years, incorporating the cultural output of Germany, Belgium and the UK. I am interested in how attitudes to technology in the past can help us to understand our technological present and future. My doctoral research focused on humanoid bodies in literature and visual culture between the 1880s and 1930s, and forged links between modernist representations and contemporary understandings of artificial people. This is currently being developed into a full-length monograph.

I have recently co-edited a volume (The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture: Cultures of Automation, forthcoming with Routledge), which was developed following a conference I organized in 2023 on ‘Automation & Automatism/s’. I have also worked on mannequins in art and literature, and have published several articles in which I explore concepts of seriality, new configurations of the human, and objectification through the figure of the department store mannequin in Emile Zola’s fiction and in Surrealist art.