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Overview
Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures+44 (0) 191 33 43465
Member of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 

Biography

My research and teaching focus on theatre, spectatorship, libertinage, and crime in early modern French literature and culture.

I am currently writing a book about Marie-Catherine Taperet, also known as Madame Lescombat (1728-1755), who achieved immense and enduring fame as a femme fatale for her part in the murder of her husband. My book explores how her celebrity was mediated in images, plays, novels, and material objects - inlcuding her own emblamed corpse. I also draw on original police archives to reveal the real woman behind the myth.

In February 2024 my monograph Reading drama in eighteenth-century France appeared with Oxford University Press. This is the first account of how plays were read in that period and of the closet drama of the time. The Enlightenment was passionate about theatre in all its forms, and this study draws on a variety of texts – including memoirs, theoretical works, and correspondences – to show that reading plays was a central element of that lively and combative theatrical culture. I propose a framework—at once historically grounded and informed by queer theory—to understand eighteenth-century closeted reading. The book also examines how writers exploited the critical, imaginative, and formal potential of closeted reading by creating plays that exceeded the confines of the playhouse and appealed instead to the reader’s imagination.

My translation of the Marquis de Sade's controversial The 120 Days of Sodom appeared with Penguin Classics in September 2016. This volume is the result of collaboration with Dr Will McMorran (Queen Mary, London). Our translation was awarded the prestigious Scott Moncrieff prize in March 2018.

I have also published a monograph Sade's Theatre: Pleasure, Vision, Masochism, plus editions of Hénault's François II, roi de France and of rare erotic plays. I have edited volumes on the representations of violence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, eighteenth-century theatre, and Sade's theatre. In addition I have produced numerous critical editions for the Complete Works of Voltaire.

I am happy to receive applications for PhDs on topics in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature and culture.

Publications

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Supervision students