book projects
Penning Personas:
The Epistolary Culture of the Ancien Régime
My current book project, provisionally entitled Penning Personas: The Epistolary Culture of the Ancien Régime, charts the emergence of practices for building a socially-oriented persona through letters. My research traces how letter writers used these practices to present themselves to society through their social networks. This history of letter-writing practices not only provides a new perspective on early modern epistolary culture, but it also speaks to issues of mediated social expression today. Learn more about this project on the podcast Entitled Opinions.
The Palais Royal, Paris
I am also developing a new research project on the history of the Palais Royal in Paris, from the ancien régime to the early nineteenth century.
I am the France-Stanford Center Fellow for the Roxane Debuisson Collection on Paris History. This fellowship supports archival work processing the newly acquired private collection on the history of Paris.
Privacy & Surveillance in Early Modern France
My next book project remains at the nexus of these three fields, investigating notions of media privacy and surveillance in early modern France. From the embodied surveillance in Louis XIV’s panoptic court at Versailles, to the rise of institutions like the Black Cabinets for surveillance of the postal system, the study of ancien régime France is key to understanding the long history of the relationship of surveillance mechanisms to privacy and to personal media. I will examine what cultural and social norms evolved that gave rise to the notion of privacy as a “right” with respect to communication media, and what that privacy entailed.
publications
Networks of Enlightenment: Digital Approaches to the Republic of Letters
Edited by Chloe Edmondson & Dan Edelstein (2019)
This volume presents a series of case studies of correspondence networks, social networks, and knowledge networks throughout Europe, with a particular focus on France. Authors examine anew some of the preeminent networks of the Enlightenment, drawing on digital methods and Social Network Analysis (SNA) to pioneer historically-driven methods for thinking about networks in early-modern societies. Learn more here.
Book launch at the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies with Dan Edelstein (Stanford), Nicholas Cronk (Oxford), and Gregory Brown (UNLV).
Previously I worked on several projects in the Digital Humanities at Stanford, under the umbrella of the NEH-funded project “Mapping the Republic of Letters,” and earned the Graduate Certificate in the Digital Humanities (2017) at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis.
The research for these projects led to publications in the volume Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Studies (ed. Simon Burrows and Glenn Roe), Digital Humanities Quarterly, The Journal of Modern History, and culminating with the above volume. This research was also presented internationally at the University of Oxford, the École normale supérieure, and the University of Edinburgh.
conferences
I regularly present my research at the annual meetings of several professional societies, including the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Modern Language Association, the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the International Communication Association, and the American Comparative Literature Association. I also have been invited to present my work internationally at the University of Oxford, the École normale supérieure, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales.
In addition, I serve as a member of the executive committee of the Modern Language Association LLC 18th-Century French Forum (2023-2028).
conferences organized
French-Speaking Worlds: Then & Now
In addition to conferences that I have organized, I am co-director with Stanford Professors Cécile Alduy and Fatoumata Seck of French-Speaking Worlds: Then & Now. This interdisciplinary speaker series convenes experts from around the world at Stanford to present leading research on the histories, literatures, and cultures of the French-speaking world from the 16th century to the 21st century. Learn more here.
May 11, 2023: Learn more here.
April 28-29, 2016: Learn more here.
teaching
At Stanford University, I teach French literature and history from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century. Some of the authors I enjoy teaching include Chrétien de Troyes, Louise Labé, Madame de Lafayette, Corneille, Molière, Voltaire, Laclos, Alexandre Dumas fils, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Colette, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. In addition to teaching survey courses on early modern French literature, two of my favorite classes to teach are:
Coffee & Cigarettes: The Making of French Intellectual Culture
In this course, we examine the quintessential French figure of l’intellectuel from a longterm historical perspective. Proceeding in counter-chronological order from the 21st century back to the 16th century, we analyze how our contemporary ideas about the intellectual have been shaped over time by its many different incarnations: the social activist, the philosopher, the artist, the historian, and the writer.
French Kiss: The History of Love and the French Novel
How did individuals experience love throughout history? How do novels reflect this evolution of love through the ages? And, most significantly, how have French novels shaped our own understanding of and expectations for romantic love today? The course explores many forms of love from the ancien régime to the 20th century. Sentiment and seduction, passion and desire, the conflict between love and society: students examine these themes from a historical perspective, in tandem with the evolution of the genre of the novel