I am a doctoral student in French at Lincoln College, Oxford, supervised by Professor Caroline Warman. My DPhil project, provisionally titled ‘Evidence, example, and expérience in the eighteenth-century French essay’, examines the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers understood the essay and its implications by considering the different forms of evidence used to construct their arguments. In doing so, it asks what this means for the essay form’s importance to the proliferation of writing known as the Enlightenment.
I hold a BA in Modern Languages and History from Durham University and worked in the charity sector for several years before completing an MSt in Modern Languages at Oxford in 2023, funded by the Lincoln College Kingsgate Master’s Award. My doctoral project is generously co-funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP studentship, the Lincoln College Kingsgate Scholarship, and the Clarendon Fund.