I am a tenure-track assistant professor of French literature and culture at the University of St. Gallen and an Associate Member of the Centre for Humanities and Health at King’s College London. I was previously a Swiss National Science Foundation research fellow at the University of Zurich, affiliated with the Institute of Romance Studies and the Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine. In 2016, I completed my three-year tenure as a Leverhulme Early Career fellow at the Department of French at King’s College London; prior to that I was the Joanna Randall McIver Junior Research Fellow at St Hugh’s College, Oxford University. After a BA in Philosophy and Modern Languages at Oxford University, an MPhil in European Literature and Culture at Cambridge University, I received my PhD in French literature and philosophy from Cambridge University in 2011 (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council). During my doctoral studies, I was a member of the Équipe Proust at the Institut des Texts et Manuscripts Modernes and a pensionnaire étrangère at the École Normale Supérieure, Rue d’Ulm. In 2022, I was a fellow at the Camargo Foundation (Cassis, France).
My research has covered a wide range of topics in twentieth-century and contemporary French literature, philosophy and film. It is characterized by the aim to foster a culture of critical interdisciplinary thinking about literature, particularly with regard to medicine. To this end, my work crosses disciplinary boundaries and seeks to have a wider societal impact on how we think about healthcare, medicine and dying. I also work on medical ethics and have co-founded the Swiss Network for Ethics of Care, a platform for exchange and collaboration in the field of ethics of care.
The overall aim of my current research is to critically assess questions relating to medicine and healthcare in French twentieth-century and contemporary literature and the visual arts. This is why most of my work falls under the broad field of the Medical Humanities. I am an affiliated Researcher at the Center for the Humanities and Health at King’s College London and the Center for Medical Humanities at the University of Zurich; I have also held a research fellowship at the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch.
I am interested in methodological questions defining the field of the Medical Humanities and its recent critical turn. Together with Monika Pietrzak-Franger (University of Vienna) I am currently editing a volume on medicine and literature for Cambridge University Press’s Critical Concepts Series (forthcoming in 2023), as well as a special issue entitled ‘Transitions and Transformations: The Medical Humanities in Times of COVID-19’ for BMJ Medical Humanities (2023).
My interests in the philosophy of medicine relate to the history of concepts in bioethics and psychotherapy ethics, as well as to narrative and care ethics. In 2015, I was a Yale-Hastings Scholar at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and in 2017 a visiting fellow at the Hastings Center. Together with Vanessa Rampton (McGill) I have worked on the Kantian heritage of the bioethical principle of autonomy, as well as the role of care ethics in psychotherapy. Our work has been published in The Oxford Handbook of Psychotherapy Ethics (2020) and The Journal of Medicine & Philosophy (2022).
In my current book project, I seek to contextualize the meaning of ‘palliative’ within French literature, culture and the French healthcare system since 1975. This project was founded by a Swiss National Science Foundation Marie Heim-Vögtlin Grant. Drawing on some of this work, I have co-edited, together with Steven Wilson (Queen’s University Belfast), a special issue entitled ‘The Cultural Languages of Pain’ for the Journal of Romance Studies (2022). We are also currently co-editing another special issue entitled ‘The Cultures of Palliative Care’ for Literature and Medicine (forthcoming 2024).
In 2023, I am embarking on a new project that builds on the hypothesis that contemporary writing and visual culture constitute an untapped resource for disentangling the reciprocal interactions between law, medicine and the arts that are at stake in assisted dying. Analysing a trilingual corpus of texts and films from five countries, it will seek to review life termination decisions and the law-making processes they shape and are shaped by. This project is supported by an ERC Starting Grant (101040399, evaluated and selected by the ERC, financed by SERI).
I focus on questions raised by the representation of memory, mourning, trauma and pain in twentieth French literature and philosophy. I have explored these topics in the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Ruwen Ogien, Paul Ricœur, André Malraux, Jacques Derrida, Louis Wolfson and Frédéric Badré. Together with Olga Smith and Peter Collier I have co-edited a volume that brings together some of the most distinctive voices in contemporary discussions of memory and forgetting in French and Francophone studies.
My book, Mourning and Creativity in Proust, explores Proust’s answers to some of the fundamental challenges of the inevitable human experience of mourning.
Together with Tom Stern (University College London) I have recently co-edited a volume on Proust and philosophy for Routledge’s Philosophical Minds series (The Proustian Mind, 2023).
Within film studies, I focus primarily on documentary film. I have written on the role of testimony in film, as well as the genre of the first-person documentary more broadly.
In my current book project, I engage with intermediality more broadly, considering the role that the photographic and filmic documentation of hospitals and hospices has played in shaping the public image of end-of-life care in France.