Spring 2024 Office Hours

Tuesdays and Thursdays 2:00pm - 3:00pm and by appointment 

I am a third-year PhD candidate in the University of Virginia’s French department. Historically, my research centered on motherhood and violence towards women: more specifically, how motherhood in the fictional setting becomes distorted/perverted and the way in which the narrative form (metaphor, organization of architectural description becoming anthropomorphized to reflect female anatomy, etc) leads the reader to witness an intertextual act of sexual violence towards female characters. While earning my Masters at Notre Dame, I conducted research on the likes of Emile Zola, Agnès Varda, Gustave Flaubert, with projects discussing precinematic qualities of the naturalist novel, transforming the decaying landscape into an activist’s playground in Les glaneurs et la glaneuse and the chaotic separation between one’s corporeal prison and the infiniteness of the divine voice haunting the decadent empire depicted in Hérodias. I used the theme of the “body”, whether it be a biological entity or a conceptual one, to organize a vast array of literatures around the same notional perspectives of birth, life, decay and death in French literature and visual art.

I am currently interested in the narrative reiteration of dirt that highlights its effects on humans where dirt is already present: the field, the farm, the dirt road, the coal pits, etc., in realist and naturalist French rural novels of the late 19th century. I question what human interactions with dirt reveal about these genres’ intersections with nature and the environment. In particular, I am concerned with the significance these encounters have in light of women getting physically dirty in the late 19th century novel and the material culture of dirt in naturalist and realist French fiction.

Education:

• Doctor of Philosophy in French, University of Virginia (in Progress)
• Master of Arts in French and Francophone Studies, University of Notre Dame (Conferred May 2021)
• Bachelor of Arts in French with Honors and Spanish, Florida State University (Conferred May 2019)

     Honors and Awards:

1. Nanovic Institute for European Studies Conference Presentation Grant
2. Graduate Student Union Conference Presentation Grant
3. Honor’s Medallion Recipient for the completion of an Honors Thesis: “In Search of Lost Meaning: Exploring Lexical Lacunæ in English Translations of Indiana”
4. Recipient of the Winthrop-King Undergraduate Summer 2018 Scholarship in French

Conference Presentations:

April 2022:

“Stroboscopique, narcissique et pragmatique: Getting to the Root of Activism in Varda’s Les glaneurs et la glaneuse” (FIGS “Déracinement/Scradicamento” Graduate Conference at the University of Pennsylvania)

March 2021:

“M-other Monster: Bestial Birth and Polemical Mothering in Gargantua and Les Tragiques” (Equinoxes 2020/2021 “Saisir l’intime” Graduate Conference at Brown University)

“M-other Monster: Bestial Birth and Polemical Mothering in Gargantua and Les Tragiques”

(FIGS Graduate Conference at the University of Pennsylvania)

December 2020:

“Une violence chez elles: Rape and the Invasion of Female Space in Heptaméron 14 and 32” (Princeton University FIT “Sacrifices” Graduate Conference)

February 2020:

 “Gendered Representations of Gluttony in L’Assommoir” (University of Arizona 2nd Annual Graduate Conference in French)

Research Interests:

Late 19th century literature

Naturalism

Émile Zola

Realism

Gustave Flaubert

Dirt and the material culture of the novel

The Sanitary Movement of the 19th century

Contamination

Representations of the corpse in literature

Motherhood

Women’s Studies

Critical Theory