Alice Roullière

I am a departmental lecturer in French replacing Katherine Ibbett until October 2029. I have been doing research and teaching early modern French literature in Oxford since 2019 and I’ve been in the UK since 2016 when I started my PhD at Cambridge. Before that, I did my undergraduate and Master’s studies in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne. I have a teaching degree in Classics (the ‘Agrégation’) and I have used my interest in Latin and Greek literature in my previous research projects. My new research project focuses on Imagined Colonialism and the representation of Peru in early modern French literature: among other things, I look at the way the reception of classical epics was changed and altered by the complex transmissions of accounts of the 'New world'. I try to understand why the Inca empire captured the imagination of early modern French authors and what was the political significance of literary works around Peru written in French.

At Trinity, I teach translation from French to English but I mainly teach authors and texts of the early modern period, from the 16th to the 18th century. I teach all the literature papers for the First Years.  I also teach Paper VII (Early Modern Period Paper) and Paper X (Author Paper), for both Trinity students and students from other colleges. 

At the MML Faculty level, I teach undergraduate lectures about the early modern French period. I have also taught the French and Classical Tragedy Paper. 

My doctoral work and first monograph focused on the sixteenth-century poet Pierre de Ronsard and poetic ghosts. Although it seems like a narrow topic, the question of ghosts led me to think about the troubled narratives around national identity that arise during the early modern period and how they intersect with the renewed interest in apparitions and the supernatural in the 16th century. My project focused on epic ghosts that Ronsard calls 'idoles' and the role they play in the political imagination of the early modern period. 

‘Montaigne and Inter-Imperiality’, Montaigne décolonial/Decolonial Montaigne, special issue of the Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne, ed. by Valérie Dionne and Ali Benmakhlouf, in preparation, to be submitted in September 2026.

‘Anachronisme et impérialité’, Anachronisme et cultures de la première modernité (XVIe-XVIIIe), special issue of Cahiers-Débats, ed. by Anne Duprat et Nicholas Paige, forthcoming.

- ‘Fantômes et mécénat : relire « l’Elegie à Loïs des Masures » (1560)’, Actes du colloque « Lire et relire Ronsard », Sorbonne université 19-21 juin 2024, forthcoming. 

‘What Binds Together the Dead and the Living Beyond Affect? Material and Symbolic Inheritance in Early Modern French Funerary Poetry’, in Rethinking Lyric Communities in Premodern Worlds, special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, ed. Francesco Giusti, Nicolas Longinotti, Laura Benella, 56 (2026), 153-74

‘L’épitaphe dramatisée et l’influence des Tumuli de Pontano en France au seizième siècle’, Réforme, Humanisme Renaissance, 99:2, (2024), 177-207

Ronsard’s Poetic Ghosts: Irony, Imagination and Epic Idoles, Oxford, Legenda 2024, 233 p.

‘Mocking the Fear of Ghosts in Ronsard’s Hymnes’, French Studies: A Quarterly Review, 76:4 (2022), 519-37- shortlisted for the Malcom Bowie Prize.

Alice Roullière, Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy, ‘Catching up with Time’ in Catching up with Time: Belatedness and Anachronies in Francophone literature and Culture, ed. by Alice Roullière and Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy (Peter Lang: Berne, 2022), pp. 1-15

Alice Roullière, ‘Ronsard and the Ghost of Astyanax’, Early Modern French Studies, 42:1 (2020), 2–21.