Emma Gilby works on literary and intellectual history, especially within the early modern period. Much of her research has focused on poetic theory and its connections to the rhetoric, philosophy and theology of seventeenth-century France.

Her publications include Descartes’s Fictions: Reading Philosophy with Poetics (OUP, 2019); Sublime Worlds: Early Modern French Literature (MHRA [Legenda], 2006); and an edition of Longinus, De la sublimité du discours (L'Act-Mem, 2007). She has also co-edited The Places of Early Modern Criticism (OUP, 2021); Method and Variation: Narrative in Early Modern French Thought (MHRA [Legenda], 2013); and Space: New Dimensions in French Studies (Peter Lang, 2005). Recent articles look at poetry and satire in the seventeenth-century salon context, and at the literary quarrel concerning the letters of Guez de Balzac. She has been a CRASSH Early Career Fellow, a Scaliger Fellow at the University of Leiden, and the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize. She currently co-edits the journal French Studies.