About our staff

I was born in London and raised in France, before returning to the UK to pursue my studies in History at the University of Cambridge. I obtained my PhD at Cambridge in 2010, and was appointed to a Research Fellowship there in 2009. I have also held short-term fellowships at the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Study (Uppsala) and at the Huntington Library. I came to Edinburgh in September 2012 to take up a Chancellor’s Fellowship in History. I became a Lecturer in 2017 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2020. 

Summary of research interests

• Britain & Ireland
• Europe

• Culture
• Ideas
• Language & Literature

• Early Modern

I work on early modern European intellectual history, with an emphasis on late 16th century and early 17th century moral and political thought. I am especially interested in the following topics: the history of conceptions of the self or person; the reception and transformation of ancient ethics; the relationship between working methods, literary forms and philosophical ideas; the thought and writings of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592).  

My current project focuses on representations of the household and household management (oeconomia) in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. How did early modern thinkers locate the household in the broader landscape of human life and activity? What was the relationship, in their eyes, between the identities and duties of human beings as individuals, members of households, and citizens?

My research seeks to answer these questions by connecting discussions of ‘economics’ to developments in the two other branches of ‘practical’ philosophy in this period: ethics and politics. What role does the household play in early modern reflections on the well-lived or well-managed life – a life embedded within the hierarchical yet symbiotic context of the family? Everyday, apparently mundane activities such as account keeping or animal husbandry, I suggest, were often charged with broader, symbolic significance. Household management was closely linked to self-management, serving as both model and metaphor for the prudent dispensation and ordering of body, soul and mind. At the same time, the household provided the link between the individual human being and wider society, mediating between natural and voluntary forms of human association. How were the boundaries between the economic and the political, the domestic and the public, drawn in this period? How did thinkers situate the household, both conceptually and historically, in relation to the commonwealth?

• History in Theory (Approaches to Early Modern Intellectual History)

• Intellectual History from Antiquity to the Renaissance