Principal Investigator
Helena is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature and is the PI for Cultures of Philosophy, for which she is working on France and has oversight of the project as a whole. She is initially working on the ‘scientific’ verse and prose writing of Madeleine de Scudéry; and will also be looking at a range of other writers across multiple genres; researching the Académie d’Arles, one of the few to admit women; and analysing seventeenth-century ideas about the figure of the (female) philosopher from a series of sources, including historical dictionaries and biographies. More widely, her research focuses on seventeenth-century France, in particular cultures of learning, women’s varied intellectual practices and their reception, classical reception, cultural quarrels, and translation studies; and her book, Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (OUP: 2024), came out recently.
