Emma works at the intersection of literary criticism and the history of ideas. Her first book is Politics and Politiques in Sixteenth-Century France: A Conceptual History (Cambridge, 2021). It examines uses of the word ‘politique’ and changing conceptions of politics during the Wars of Religion (1562-98). Read more about this work here.

Emma’s recent article about ‘political homelessness’ in the sixteenth century, using Montaigne as a case study, was named runner up in both the Forum Prize (2021) and the Malcolm Bowie Prize (2022). 

Good and bad politics were (and are) often framed in terms of good and bad lives. Emma is now working on representations of life and living in France, especially where natural-physical accounts of ‘being alive’ are implicated in moral and narrative accounts of ‘a life’. Her current book project, Surviving the Renaissance explores this topic in French literature between c. 1550-1650. This work focuses on live as survival in difficult circumstances: in war, illness, old age, unrequited love, etc. In other words, it considers the ‘bad life’ that is the foil to the good. Emma’s article on the politics of negatively framed life received the Richard Parish Prize in 2023.

To hear Emma speak on the CRASSH ‘Thoughtlines’ Podcast about the ‘languishing life’ of early modernity, and its resonance in the present, listen here:

This project has led to the development of a second project, provisionally entitled ‘Qualities of Life in Pre-Modernity’, analyzing how writers, thinkers, and scientists conceived of life and its qualities in a broader time period (c.1500-1800), and asking how well-being was understood before the rise of social science.

Overall, Emma is interested in how pre-modern ideas connect with modern and contemporary ones. This is not only part of her work on life, survival, and the good life, but also part of a connected project on how twentieth-century humanism was conceived with and against the pre-modern, especially in the work of Edward W. Said, whose archive she researched as Edward. W. Said Fellow at Columbia University in Spring 2023.

Emma has been involved in many collaborative projects, including ‘Renaissance Conservations’ (with Simon Park, Oxford) and ‘Early Modern Keywords’ (run by Ita Mac Carthy and Richard Scholar, both at Durham). From 2016-19 she was a co-organiser of ‘FribOx’, a network between the universities of Oxford and Fribourg. More recently she worked with Luca Zenobi (Cambridge) on a project on on ‘Fiction and Disinformation in Early Modern Europe, which was published as a Supplement of Past and Present in 2022, and on ‘writing life’ in pre-modern English and French texts with Emily Kate Price (Cambridge).