I hold an Honors B.A. in French and English from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I wrote two senior theses, both of which approach early modern poetry through the lens of ecology and aesthetics.
In my research, I tend to imagine ways in which scientific movements and literary styles coincide in the early modern period. Values of nature and artifice, for example, can be traced in the near-simultaneous turn from cosmography to topography and in Montaigne’s development of the humble, localized genre of his Essais. I was able to take this trajectory up in a different context in my senior thesis in French. Bringing together poetic and philosophical texts and agricultural manuals, I showed how, in the mid-sixteenth century, there came to be a common urge to at once “naturalize” the French language and to “cultivate” the natural territories of what will become the French nation.