Professor Emma Gilby

Research interests: 

• Early modern literary and intellectual history, especially Descartes and Pascal
• Rhetoric and poetics
• Ecocriticism and environmental history
• Archive studies
• Disciplinary history 

Recent research projects: 

Much of Prof. Gilby’s research has focused on poetic theory and its connections to the rhetoric, philosophy and theology of seventeenth-century France. In Descartes’s Fictions: Reading Philosophy with Poetics (OUP, 2019), she argued that humanist theorising about poetics represents a vital intellectual context for Descartes’s work. An interest in Cartesian reception also resulted in Descartes and the Non-Human (Cambridge University Press Elements, Environmental Humanities Series, 2025), which considers the Discours de la méthode as well as a broad cross-section of Descartes’s other writings, all alongside contemporary narratives about the natural world. This work on the environmental early modern aims to offer a new set of resources for ecocriticism, since ecocritical studies often start with a reference to Descartes.

As part of these research projects, Prof. Gilby studied Descartes’s correspondence with Guez de Balzac, co-edited by H. Bibas and K.-T. Butler (Paris: Droz, 1933-4). The subsequent discovery that Henriette Bibas and Kathleen Butler were early teachers of French and Italian at the University of Cambridge led to an interest in the first years of ‘modern languages’ as a university discipline. Since October 2024, she has been working on a three-year project funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, entitled A New Modernism: Women and the Making of Modern Languages. The project will trace the development of a pioneering network of early linguists, focusing on their internationalist perspective, their use of the medieval and early modern periods as a point of cultural comparison and their impact on literary criticism as well as language study.

Prof. Gilby has been a CRASSH Crausaz-Wordsworth Fellow, a Scaliger Fellow at the University of Leiden and a Teaching Fellow at the the Institute of French Cultural Studies, Dartmouth College. From 2018-2024, she was Co-Editor of the journal French Studies.

Published works: 

Books (authored and co-edited):

• Descartes and the Non-Human (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Elements [Environmental Humanities Series]), 2025
• The Places of Early Modern Criticism, edited by Gavin Alexander, Emma Gilby and Alexander Marr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)
• Descartes’s Fictions: Reading Philosophy with Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)
• Method and Variation: Narrative in Early Modern French Thought, edited by Emma Gilby and Paul White (London: MHRA [Legenda], 2013)
• Pseudo-Longin, De la sublimité du discours, traduction inédite du XVIIe siècle, introduite, éditée et annotée par Emma Gilby, avec une préface de Delphine Denis (Chambéry: L’Act-Mem, 2007)
• Sublime Worlds: Early Modern French Literature (London: MHRA [Legenda], 2006)
• Space: New Dimensions in French Studies, edited by Emma Gilby and Katja Haustein (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005)

Selected articles and chapters:

• ‘The Lettres provinciales’ in The Blackwell Companion to Pascal, ed. by Roger Ariew and Yuval Avnur (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming)
• ‘Rhetoric and Poetry’, with Timothy Chesters and Nicholas Hammond, in The Cambridge History of Rhetoric, edited by Virginia Cox and Jennifer Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025)
• ‘“L’Action héroïque de Monsieur Arnauld”: A Dramatic Episode at the Sorbonne, 1641’, in Early Modern French Studies (2023), 1-8
• ‘Force et simplicité. La première réception de Bossuet en Angleterre, 1672-1686’, in Revue Bossuet 12 (2021), 111-30
• ‘The Genre of the Bouts Rimés and Seventeenth-Century Satire’, in Coups de maître. Studies in Honour of John D. Lyons, ed. by Michael Meere and Kelly F. McDonnell (Bern: Peter Lang, 2021), 373-89
• ‘Présence d’esprit in Action in Seventeenth-Century France: Salon Poetry and the Lettres provinciales’ in The Places of Early Modern Criticism, edited by Gavin Alexander, Emma Gilby and Alexander Marr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 176-91
• ‘Pascal’ in The Cambridge History of French Thought, edited by Michael Moriarty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)
• ‘Where to Draw the Line? Longinus, Goulu and Balzac’s Lettres’, in LIAS 43.2 (2016), ‘The Sublime in Early Modern Theories of Art and Architecture’, ed. by S. Bussels, B. van Oostveldt and W. Jansen, 225-41
• ‘The Pleasures of Hypothesis: Benjamin and the Provisional French Trauerspiel’ in Yale French Studies 124 (2013), 10-23
• ‘Having the Last Word: Authority in Bossuet’s Funeral Orations’ in Evocations of Eloquence: Rhetoric, Literature and Religion in Early Modern France, ed. by Nicholas Hammond and Michael Moriarty (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), 37-51
• ‘La théorie et la pratique du sublime chez Corneille’, in Pratiques de Corneille, ed. by Myriam Dufour-Maître (Rouen: Publications des universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2012), 489-501
• ‘Descartes’s Account of Indifference’, in Renaissance Studies 26.5 (2012), 658-672
• ‘Descartes’s “Morale par provision”: A Re-evaluation’ in French Studies 65(4) (2011), 444-458
• ‘The Seventeenth-Century Sublime: Boileau and Poussin’ in Tate Papers 13 (spring 2010)
• ‘Commentary and Impact: Longinus on the Sublime’ in The Cambridge Literary Review 1.2 (2010), 198-208    
• Le “sens commun” et le “sentir en commun”: Corneille et D’Aubignac’ in Littératures classiques 68 (été 2009), 243-254
• “Émotions” and the Ethics of Response in Seventeenth-Century Dramatic Theory’, Modern Philology (August 2009), 52-72
• The above republished in Literary Criticism 1400-1800: D’Aubignac, ed. Michael Meere (Gale/Cengage, 2013), 209-220
• The Language of Fortune in Descartes’ in Chance and Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. by John D. Lyons and J. Kathleen Wine (Ashgate, 2009), 155-168
• ‘Les textes qui nous restent de Tallemant des Réaux: mise au point bibliographique’, XVIIe siècle 231 (2006), 499-507
• ‘Economies of Perspective in Seventeenth-Century France’, Seventeenth-Century French Studies 27 (2005), 29-38
• Sous le signe du sublime: la rencontre de Boileau et Longin’, in Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 31 (2004), 416-426
• ‘Models of Imagination in the Pensées: Re-reading Pascal and Montaigne’ in Seventeenth-Century French Studies 25 (2003), 65-73