Research

My book project, Amies des Livres: Modernist Networks, Gender, and Translation in Literary Paris, argues that women translators were the dominant force behind Anglo-French modernist literary exchange. While interwar Paris has historically captivated the imagination of modernist studies, existing scholarship tends to examine expatriate writers in an English-language vacuum. This lack of scholarly attention to translation is the product of a discursive hierarchy that valorizes original writing as active and masculine and denigrates translation as passive and feminine. Reversing this implicit hierarchy, I place translation at the center of my analysis, unearthing how works of English-language modernism were produced and circulated in French translation by women translators and publishers. I use methodology from the sociology of literature and book history to analyze my corpus of first edition novels and modernist little magazines, published reviews, and largely unpublished diaries, letters, and business records, requiring extensive archival research in the United States, England, and France. The project includes chapters on Adrienne Monnier and translation infrastructure at her bookstore La Maison des Amis des Livres, Dorothy Bussy and Hope Mirrlees’s multifaceted careers as authors and translators, and the role of women translators in Rosamond Lehmann and Virginia Woolf’s publication and reception in France. I argue that these “amies des livres” or [female] friends of books, a term I adopt from Adrienne Monnier, were co-creators of meaning and essential collaborators in a network of cultural exchange.

Research for this project has been supported by fellowships from the Harry Ransom Center and the Chateaubriand Fellowship Program. I published an article based on the Dorothy Bussy chapter in the American journal Feminist Modernist Studies in January 2025, and an article adapted from the Rosamond Lehmann chapter is forthcoming in the French publication Etudes Anglaises. My second book project builds on my longstanding interest in translation and translational modernism, investigating different editorial policies around translation and multilingualism in modernist little magazines.

During my time at Washington University in St. Louis, I contributed to Melanie Micir and Anna Preus’s digital edition of Hope Mirrlees’s modernist long poem Paris. I was responsible for finding historical photographs and other contextual images to accompany the text of Mirrlees’s poem, inspired by her experience living and working in Paris during the 1919 Peace Conference. I am currently collaborating with Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber as an editorial assistant for The Critical Reception of Katherine Mansfield in English, under contract with Edinburgh University Press.