I received a B.A. in French and Art History from Williams College in 2007 and a Ph.D in French from Yale University in 2014.

I am interested in feminist writing and theory, the novel (in particular, the contemporary novel), and, more broadly, the ethical and political implications of writing and reading fiction. While I specialize in 20th- and 21st-century French literature, I have a soft spot for literature from the 18th and 19th centuries, despite the myriad ways it has of killing off its women.

My first book, Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions (Ohio State University Press, 2018), uses the collective corpus of Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig, and Anne Garréta to theorize a feminist poetics that hollows out difference and reworks our subjectivities so that we can break free of identity and exist as subjectivities without subjecthood. My second book, Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), works to combat the deodorization of the French literary imaginary and argues that the persistent excrementality of the modern French canon puts forth fecality as a corporeal, concrete corrective to abstract universalism as a site of exclusion and violence. My current book project, Ought to Fiction, is a critique of contemporary French literature’s domination by autofiction and exofiction and its unquenchable thirst for the real.

I am open to supervising doctoral students who are interested in the 20th- and 21st-century French novel (especially post-WWII) and are invested in treating literature as theory rather than through theory. Interests in feminist thought and the interface between the literary and the political are especially welcome.

Research Interests

• 20th- and 21st-century French literature
• Feminist writing and theory
• The contemporary novel
• Anti-identitarianism