I am currently Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a position I have held since completing my PhD at Harvard University in 2013. I work on French literature, culture, and thought of the long 19th century and critical theory, with particular interests in the novel, Naturalism, the environmental humanities, space and place, urban studies, race and empire, gender and sexuality, biopolitics, and the politics of reading. My first book, Mapping Prostitution: Sex, Space, and the Novel in 19th-Century Paris, argues that "naturalist" authors plot prostitution to make their name by making sense of their space and time. Looking at a series of spaces and types of prostitution, from the brothel to the brasserie to the boulevard, it also contends (via Jacques Rancière and Michel de Certeau) that these novel prostitutes evade or resist the mapping that would contain them as territory by “writing” back against their inscription—and that the democratizing effects of this literary countermapping potentially extend beyond the bounds of the book, as the novels circulate indiscriminately to readers. My work on this project was recognized by an Institute for the Arts and Humanities Faculty Fellowship at UNC (IAH Legacy Fellow; Spring 2016).
I am now at work on a second book project, Weathering Modernity: The Novel Climates of Nineteenth-Century France, which builds a case for reading 19th-century French novels today as climate fictions that train us to interpret weather and to weather the climate we have made. I was invited to present early research for this book as part of the 2016-17 "Futures of French" series of talks at La Maison Française at NYU, for a session on the environmental humanities. I am also coediting a special issue of Nottingham French Studies with Hélène Sicard-Cowan on "Émile Zola and Science," which looks at the ways Zola's work is critical of the scientific discourses that he inscribes.
My research has appeared in Nineteenth-Century French Studies and two special issues of L'Esprit créateur (including an article from my second book project, "The Climate of Naturalism: Zola's Atmospheres," which appeared in a 2017 issue on "French Ecocriticism / L'Écocritique française," edited by Daniel Finch-Race and Julien Weber). My chapter on biopolitics and the rewriting of 19th-century models of protagonism in the BBC Canada television series Orphan Black is forthcoming in Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics (Intellect, 2018), edited by Andrea Goulet and Robert A. Rushing. Articles under review include a reflection on vice, aesthetics, and the politics of reading in Zola; I received the 2015 Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award for best junior faculty essay at the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium at Princeton for an early version of this article. I also received the 2011 Naomi Schor Memorial Award for best graduate student essay at NCFS for a paper based on an early version of the first chapter of Mapping Prostitution, on the tolerated brothel in the novels of Huysmans and Goncourt.
I am the convener of a Carolina Seminar at UNC on "The Anthropocene, the Humanities, and the Social Sciences," which aims to bring scholars from different disciplines together to discuss how we might join our forces to approach a multidisciplinary crisis. I am a member of the Faculty Advisory Board of Carolina Public Humanities and frequently contribute to their programming, which brings our scholarship into the local community. I am also serving on the board of the Program in Sexuality Studies, as well as the Administrative Board of the Library and the Faculty Welfare Committee. As of Fall 2018, I advise five terrific PhD students, two MA students, and one undergraduate student writing an honors thesis (on class, immigration, and pollution in contemporary France).
I was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, though the rest of my family is from Mississippi. Despite living in Cambridge, Massachusetts for fifteen years before moving to North Carolina, I remain a Minnesotan, though I'm not sure I could still survive the winters without complaint after five years in NC. I hold a B.A. and M.A. (in French and Spanish literature and culture) and Ph.D. (in French and Francophone literature and culture) from Harvard University. Though I have always considered myself a city person, I happily live in the small town of Pittsboro, North Carolina, where I have two cats, five chickens, and an overgrown garden.
I am now at work on a second book project, Weathering Modernity: The Novel Climates of Nineteenth-Century France, which builds a case for reading 19th-century French novels today as climate fictions that train us to interpret weather and to weather the climate we have made. I was invited to present early research for this book as part of the 2016-17 "Futures of French" series of talks at La Maison Française at NYU, for a session on the environmental humanities. I am also coediting a special issue of Nottingham French Studies with Hélène Sicard-Cowan on "Émile Zola and Science," which looks at the ways Zola's work is critical of the scientific discourses that he inscribes.
My research has appeared in Nineteenth-Century French Studies and two special issues of L'Esprit créateur (including an article from my second book project, "The Climate of Naturalism: Zola's Atmospheres," which appeared in a 2017 issue on "French Ecocriticism / L'Écocritique française," edited by Daniel Finch-Race and Julien Weber). My chapter on biopolitics and the rewriting of 19th-century models of protagonism in the BBC Canada television series Orphan Black is forthcoming in Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics (Intellect, 2018), edited by Andrea Goulet and Robert A. Rushing. Articles under review include a reflection on vice, aesthetics, and the politics of reading in Zola; I received the 2015 Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award for best junior faculty essay at the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium at Princeton for an early version of this article. I also received the 2011 Naomi Schor Memorial Award for best graduate student essay at NCFS for a paper based on an early version of the first chapter of Mapping Prostitution, on the tolerated brothel in the novels of Huysmans and Goncourt.
I am the convener of a Carolina Seminar at UNC on "The Anthropocene, the Humanities, and the Social Sciences," which aims to bring scholars from different disciplines together to discuss how we might join our forces to approach a multidisciplinary crisis. I am a member of the Faculty Advisory Board of Carolina Public Humanities and frequently contribute to their programming, which brings our scholarship into the local community. I am also serving on the board of the Program in Sexuality Studies, as well as the Administrative Board of the Library and the Faculty Welfare Committee. As of Fall 2018, I advise five terrific PhD students, two MA students, and one undergraduate student writing an honors thesis (on class, immigration, and pollution in contemporary France).
I was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, though the rest of my family is from Mississippi. Despite living in Cambridge, Massachusetts for fifteen years before moving to North Carolina, I remain a Minnesotan, though I'm not sure I could still survive the winters without complaint after five years in NC. I hold a B.A. and M.A. (in French and Spanish literature and culture) and Ph.D. (in French and Francophone literature and culture) from Harvard University. Though I have always considered myself a city person, I happily live in the small town of Pittsboro, North Carolina, where I have two cats, five chickens, and an overgrown garden.
