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 has been working on the ‘scientific’ verse and prose writing of Madeleine de Scudéry, particularly her Conversations, and has produced a translation with accompanying critical introduction and notes (Open Book Publishers, 2026). Helena is now working on a range of other writers across multiple genres, including Marie de Gournay, Antoinette Salvan de Saliez and Madeleine de Souvré, Marquise de Sablé; looking at periodicals, salons and women’s relationships with Academies; and analysing seventeenth-century ideas about the figure of the (female) philosopher. More widely, her research focuses on seventeenth-century France, in particular cultures of learning, women’s varied intellectual practices and their reception, classical reception, intersections of literature and philosophy, and translation studies; and her book, Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (OUP: 2024), came out recently.
