Publications

Book

Voices from Beyond: Physiology, Sentience and the Uncanny in Eighteenth-Century French Literature, University of Virginia Press, in press (April 2022), 240 pp.

Voices from Beyond won the 2021 Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for outstanding scholarship in eighteenth-century studies. It is an interdisciplinary and transnational study of the voice, as it was constructed in French works, influenced by French vocal sciences as well as British literary and philosophical works. This book, in particular, interrogates the philosophical and literary works of well-known and lesser-known French and British writers – including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Richardson, Denis Diderot, François Baculard d’Arnaud and Jacques Cazotte, and explores how their texts theorize, represent and construct three inter-related vocal types: the sentimental, the vitalist and the uncanny. These vocal types are connected insofar as the conception of sentimental and vitalist voices – anchored to a physiological understanding of vocal organs–paradoxically led to the development of a disembodied, uncanny voice.

 

Book in Progress

In Nature’s Darkness: the Black Atlantic on French Stages.

In Nature’s Darkness examines how eighteenth-century French theater responded to the increasing presence of the Black Atlantic in French Atlantic spaces. In this study, I trace three stages of representational strategies: from colonial attempts to control the Black and French Atlantic, through an implicit recognition of the Black Atlantic’s presence in domestic spaces, to an overt celebration of the Black Atlantic’s role in Republican life.

 

Peer-Reviewed Articles

“Between Novels and Songs: Eliza Haywood’s French Romance,” Studies in the Novel, 54, no. 3 (Fall 2022), in press, (8852 words).

“Beastly Variations: Allegories on Race, Migration and Marriage,” The Opera Quarterly, 34, no. 3-4 (Fall 2020), in press, (9593 words).

Co-Authored, “Distant Approaches to the Printed Page,” Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, in press, (9351 words).

“Code Noir in Marivaux’s Theater,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 32, no. 2 (Winter 2019-2020): 272-296.

“On Chanting, Wailing, and Spell-Casting: Haunting Voices in Jacques Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. 57, no. 4 (2016): 469-90.

Co-authored, “Multimedia in the long Eighteenth Century,” Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Digital Libraries for Musicology, 2 (June 2015) 29-32.

“Sound and Sensibility in Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau,” Music & Letters. 94 (May 2013): 237-62.

Chapter in Peer-Reviewed Volume

“Flying the Colonial Skies during the French Enlightenment,” in Rediscovering French Science-Fiction: In Literature, Film and Comics, From Cyrano to Barbarella. Edited by Philippe Mather and Sylvain Rhéault, 41-64. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016.