Publications and Presentations
My research lies at the intersection of literature and visual culture studies, with a focus on narrative space bringing interdisciplinary methodologies to bear on questions of aesthetics and poetics, industry and power. Published, forthcoming, and/or current projects are in dialogue with gender studies, the medical humanities, and the environmental humanities. I have published and presented my work stateside and abroad, in English and in French.
Peer-Reviewed Articles and Chapters
Character Ecologies in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart: Beyond Heredity, Beyond Metaphor
This article reframes Zola’s character networks in the Rougon-Macquart as ecologies. By comparing episodes of transgression in La Curée and La Faute de l’abbé Mouret, I demonstrate how characters become fused with plants and gardens in each novel, forming a singular, merged entity. Consequently, I argue that narrative setting serves not merely as a location in which a story unfolds, but rather is endowed with a human-like agency. The alliance between character and environment therefore urges a reexamination of the writer’s conception of milieu, which expands to include an ecological dimension, alongside the social and hereditary.
Article in special issue of L’Esprit Créateur “Connecting Characters in Modern & Contemporary French-language Fiction,” co-edited by Rebecca Grenouilleau-Loescher and Kathryn A. Haklin (Fall 2023). Vol. 63, No. 3, pp. 37-51.
Image courtesy of Gallica (BnF), Public Domain
![Les_Fleurs_du_mal___[...]Baudelaire_Charles_btv1b86108314_23.jpeg](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60e9036828ed8477599f10f8/1626025214566-H388WZ68F8UX8723B4XF/Les_Fleurs_du_mal___%5B...%5DBaudelaire_Charles_btv1b86108314_23.jpeg)
“Enclosure for Escape: Baudelaire’s Claustrophilia in ‘La chevelure’”
This article offers a close reading of Charles Baudelaire’s poem “La chevelure” (Les Fleurs du Mal) through the lens of spatial enclosure. I contend that claustrophilia—that is, a desire for confinement—finds expression in “La chevelure” due to a constellation of structural, thematic, and phonetic elements, which subsequently forge a generative space for poetic creation. The operation of claustrophilia in this example reveals that, paradoxically, it is through captivity that escape becomes possible. This finding illuminates the spatial dimension of Baudelaire’s poetry, a compelling aspect that has been obscured by a scholarly preoccupation with time in his œuvre.
Article in Festschrift special issue of Modern Language Notes “The Poetry of Life, the Life of Poetry: Essays in Honor of Jacques Neefs,” co-edited by Kathryn A. Haklin and Abigail RayAlexander (September 2021). Vol. 136, No. 4, pp. S-69–S-89.
Image courtesy of Gallica (BnF), Public Domain
“Enclosed Exhibitions: Claustrophobia, Balloons, and the Department Store in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames”
This chapter examines spatial confinement in the eponymous department store of Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (1883). A close reading of one of the novel’s sale chapters reveals that the store director mobilizes several strategies to engender a suffocating atmosphere at the temporary exhibition. Linking literary space and publicity, I argue that the store’s promotional balloons act as ephemeral, yet dynamic advertisements that dismantle the concepts of interior and exterior space. Moreover, the balloons instantiate the ephemeral quality of the sales since, in spite of their brief duration, they produce a lasting visual effect that problematizes a spatial framework opposing inside and outside. This reading suggests that publicity contributes to the claustrophobia of commerce in Zola’s fictional ephemeral exhibitions.
Published in Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums 1750-1918, edited by Dominique Bauer and Camilla Murgia, pp. 55–77. Amsterdam University Press, 2021.
Image courtesy of Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries Special Collections, Public Domain
“Obscure Visions: The 1867 Aquarium and Its Literary Legacy”
The aquarium constructed for the 1867 Exposition Universelle captivated nineteenth-century attendees through its unprecedented design uniting two spatial imaginaries exploited by writers and explorers alike: the underground and the underwater. This article considers the legacy of the 1867 aquarium through a dual approach. First, I demonstrate how this unconventional space introduced new modes of vision by creating an immersive experience of the underwater world. In a second step, I analyze excerpts from Victor Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866) and Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870) to elucidate the aquarium’s connection to novelistic representations of underwater space. The essay argues that Hugo’s sea epic initiated a new visual paradigm relying on spatial enclosure, a perception that finds an echo in the spectatorial perspective generated by the 1867 aquarium. In tracing out the interrelations between the hybrid space of the aquarium and literature of the era, this article foregrounds the reciprocal impact of public spectacle and literary description, in addition to the intricate ways in which exhibitions at the 1867 Exposition joined entertainment and technology, science, and architecture.
Invited article published in a special issue of Dix-Neuf: Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes on the Paris Universal Expositions (2020), edited by Anne O’Neil-Henry. Vol. 2, no. 2–3, pp. 179–202.
Image courtesy of Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries Special Collections, Public Domain
Forthcoming Articles and Chapters
“Disenchanting Enchantments: Zola, Manet, and the Erotics of the Conservatory”
This essay examines the entanglement of gender, enclosed space, and (dis)enchantment in two emblematic works featuring a conservatory as a central location: Zola’s La Curée (1871–72) and Manet’s Dans la serre (1877–1879). Whereas critics have typically viewed Dans la serre as a conventional bourgeois genre painting, I argue that reading the canvas against its cultural and literary backdrop—furnished most notably by La Curée—foregrounds its hitherto little commented erotic dimension. Drawing on a symbolic field connecting text to image, close readings highlight the unique ambiguity of the conservatory as a simultaneously enchanting and disenchanting space by focusing on spatial enclosure. In turn, this argument demonstrates that enchantment and disenchantment are not dichotomous categories. Rather, novelistic and pictorial representations of the quintessentially modern space of the conservatory ultimately challenge the tidy division between enchantment and disenchantment by exposing the coexistence of these two ostensible opposites. This finding underscores the entwining of literary and artistic worlds at a time when developing architectural forms reflected and expressed changing industrial trends and evolving social values.
Book chapter in the collective volume Space and Imagination in Literature & Architecture during the Long Nineteenth Century: The Porous Interior (Eds. Dominique Bauer, Jill Cornish, Alexandre Dubois, Kathryn A. Haklin). Currently under review with Amsterdam University Press.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain
Recent Conference Presentations
“Passing Time with the Enemy: A Baudelairean Intertext in Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman”
48th Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium
Johns Hopkins University
November 2023
“Underground Film: Alice Guy’s Transatlantic Cinema”
47th Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium
City University of New York, Vassar College, & Yeshiva University
November 2022
“Beyond Heredity: Exploring Character Ecologies in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart”
53rd Annual Northeast Modern Language Association Convention
Johns Hopkins University & University at Buffalo
March 2022
“Socio-Environmental Protest and Animal Poet(h)ics in Germinal”
30th Anniversary Association Internationale Zola et Naturalisme Conference
University of Alabama
March 2022
“Zola’s Horsepower: Harnessing the Poetic Power of Pit Ponies in Germinal”
46th Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium
Georgetown University & George Washington University
October 2021
“When the Message Becomes the Medium: Confinement in the Virtual Classroom”
74th Annual KFLC: The Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Conference
University of Kentucky
April 2021
At the panel “Teaching in the Time of COVID: Medical Humanities and Literature/Culture Pedagogy Today,” co-organized with Julie Singer
Book Reviews
Elizabeth L. Block, Dressing Up: The Women Who Influenced French Fashion (MIT Press, 2021). Global Nineteenth-Century Studies 1, No. 1, June 2022, pp. 129–130.
Heidi Brevik-Zender, editor. Fashion, Modernity, and Materiality in France: From Rousseau to Art Deco (State University of New York Press, 2018). Modern Language Notes 135, No. 4, September 2020, pp. 986–989.
Sharon Marcus, The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton University Press, 2019). Nineteenth-Century French Studies 48, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring-Summer 2020, online review.
Sun-Young Park, Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). Nineteenth-Century French Studies 48, Nos. 1 & 2 Fall-Winter 2019, online review.
Heidi Brevik-Zender, Fashioning Spaces: Mode and Modernity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Paris (University of Toronto Press, 2015). Modern Language Notes 132, No. 4, September 2017, pp. 1120–1123.
William Butcher, Jules Verne inédit : les manuscrits déchiffrés (ENS Éditions, 2015). Nineteenth-Century French Studies 46, Nos. 1 & 2 Fall-Winter 2017, online review.
Hannah Thompson, Naturalism Redressed: Identity and Clothing in the Novels of Émile Zola. (Legenda, 2004). Nineteenth-Century French Studies 42, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring-Summer 2014, online review.
Eric H. Du Plessis, The Nineteenth-Century French Novel. (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2013). Nineteenth-Century French Studies 42, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring-Summer 2014, online review.