I am Professor of French Literature and Digital Humanities in the Faculty of Letters at Sorbonne University, where I teach into the UFR of French and Comparative Literature and am a member of the Centre d’étude de la langue et des littératures françaises (CELLF UMR 8599) as well as leader of the project-team ObTIC.
Before moving to the Sorbonne, I was Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the Australian National University and a researcher at the Centre for Digital Humanities Research in the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences. Prior to my time in Canberra, I held a highly competitive Mellon Post-doctoral Fellowship in Digital Humanities at the University of Oxford, the first digital humanities position of its kind at Oxford, and a post held jointly between the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and the Oxford e-Research Centre. I was also elected as a Research Fellow at Wolfson College and the Voltaire Foundation, both at Oxford.
During my graduate training, I spent eight years as a Senior Project Manager for the University of Chicago’s ARTFL Project (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language), one of the older and better known North American research and development centres for computer-assisted text analysis. Since 2010 I have served as Associate Editor of the online digital edition of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, a flagship digital humanities project developed in collaboration with ARTFL and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in France. I have published on a variety of scholarly subjects, from French literary and intellectual history, to the design and use of new digital methodologies for literary research, both in traditional venues and collaboratively in various digital humanities journals. I received my PhD with honours in French literature from the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures at the University of Chicago in 2010.
My first book, The Passion of Charles Péguy: Literature, Modernity, and the Crisis of Historicism (Oxford University Press, October 2014) examines the literary-critical thought of the French writer Charles Péguy (1873-1914). An essayist, poet, political thinker, and cultural critic, Péguy’s decade-long polemic with the positivist historians of his time was one of the first significant challenges to the historicist approach to literature and literary criticism, as well as to the methodological underpinnings of the newly-formed discipline of literary history. Péguy’s defence of the autonomy of the literary text thus shares a direct parentage with later formalist and hermeneutic literary theory, from Anglo-American New Criticism to French Post-structuralism and Deconstruction; connections that invite us to reconsider and re-evaluate Péguy’s place among French literary thinkers and to consider the further and future implications of literary-historical studies in the digital age. [Mastodon]