Trained both as a literary scholar and a digital humanist, my work is divided between my research on French Early-Modern intellectual history and my interest in leveraging new computational techniques to enhance the study of text. As a core member of the ARTFL Project for over a decade, I have been mostly focused on devising Natural Language Processing and Data-Mining techniques to tackle large datasets, such as search and retrieval, text-reuse detection, or clustering. As such, I have been engaged in numerous computational research projects, ranging from data-mining Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie to uncover the discursive makeup of the classes of knowledge, to reevaluating the Enlightenment impact on French revolutionary debates, to developing digital tools meant to support scholarly work on large text corpora.
My book, Rousseau et le matérialisme (Oxford: Oxford University Studies on the Enlightenment, 2020), which focuses on the central Enlightenment figure of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, has greatly benefited from my use and development of digital tools. In it, I undertook to reevaluate Rousseau's place in Enlightenment thought, by delving into a question that had long perplexed scholars of Rousseau, that is, the key role played by materialist thought in his work. My work describes how Jean-Jacques Rousseau created a life ethic underpinned by a materialist understanding of human evolution. In developing my analyses, I strove to overcome the divide separating the technicity of Digital Humanities from more traditional approaches.
I am currently leading the development of a new digital platform called the Intertextual Hub. This complexe of tools aims to provide the research community with the means to achieve a broad and exhaustive perspective on intertextuality and intellectual influence on a set of textual corpora in various languages with which ARTFL works in the context of the new Textual Optics Lab. We have significant holdings in French, of course, but also in Italian, English, Latin, Greek, Chinese and Japanese. ARTFL has recently obtained support from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop the Intertextual Hub to gain insights into the intertextual relationships between the age of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
My teaching has a strong interdisciplinary component, at the crossroads between the digital humanities, literary studies, intellectual history, and political philosophy. Though I have taught classes in 18th century French literature, or Early-Modern political philosophy, I have most recently been focused on introducing students to computational methodologies for the study of text.