Katherine Ibbett

In recent years my work has run along two main strands: emotion and environment. My major publication in the first area is Compassion’s Edge (2018), which explores the affective undertow of religious toleration. The book explores the language of fellow-feeling – pity, compassion, charitable care – that flourished in the century or so after the Wars of Religion. The project was supported by a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard, and in 2018 won the Biennial Book Prize of the Society for Renaissance Studies. I’ve also edited another book on compassion, and another on love, and written a number of articles about emotion and affect as both a theoretical and historical question. 

I’m also very engaged by questions in the environmental humanities and am especially interested in what an attention to literary detail brings to those conversations. I just completed a book manuscript entitled Reading with Rivers in the Early Modern French World, which follows rivers from the Lignon to the Mississippi across French texts from 1600-1750. I argue that reading the river gives us a new perspective on early modern France, a period and place that was active in reworking the notion of a river itself, and also on France’s American projects, in which the river was central to France’s attempt to reshape the world. In turn, reading with these rivers give a perspective on reading the textual forms of early modern France. Work on this book was supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship; I’ve also carried out research for the American tributaries of this work as a visiting fellow at the John Carter Brown library in Providence and at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

In future years I want to think more about how these emotional and environmental interests intertwine; I’m planning to work on the history of floods. Meanwhile, I’m currently writing about ingratitude in seventeenth-century writing, and I’m beginning a very different sort of project for a wider audience, about how twentieth-century English women writers read women writers of the French seventeenth century.

In college, I usually teach the first years the two papers (III and IV) which serve as an introduction to literary studies in French. For the second- and final-year undergraduates, I teach all kinds of sixteenth and seventeenth-century French writing (papers VII and X): plays, newspaper gossip, natural histories, novels, and so on. I also teach translation into English. 

For the Faculty, I lecture to undergraduates on a range of early modern topics: I’ve taught series on gender and sexuality, on early modern prose fiction, and on histories of the early modern Americas, as well as on authors like Racine or Lafayette. I’m committed to thinking about the relation between early modern texts and critical questions of our own time, and that dialogue is very much at work in the way I teach.

I welcome applications from prospective postgraduates working on any aspect of early modern French writing, and especially those interested in prose fiction, emotions and affect, the early Americas, or the environmental humanities.

Monographs

Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and its Limits in Early Modern France (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018)

The Style of the State in French Theater, 1630-1660: Neoclassicism and Government (Ashgate, 2009)

Recent articles and chapters 

‘The False River of Julien Poydras, Poet, Politician, Plantation Owner,’ forthcoming in Humanities special issue on ‘Aquatic Territories,’ ed. Camille Mathieu.

‘Saved from the waters: the drowning world of Paul Lejeune.” In Before Canada, ed. Allan Greer (Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024), 246–267 

‘Sheepships: Robin Mouton goes to Sea (Rabelais, Choisy, Voltaire)’, French Studies 74.2 (2020): 189-202

‘The Philosophers versus the Sponge: Feeling Early Modern.’ In The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect ed. Todd Reeser (Routledge, 2023)

‘Andromaque Translated: John Crowne’s Racine and the Refugee’, in Racine’s Andromaque: Absences and Displacements, ed. Nicholas Hammond and Joseph Harries (Amsterdam: Brill, 2019), 133-146

‘Faking it: affect and gender in the Essais’, in Montaigne, Affect, Emotion, ed. Todd Reeser. Special issue, Montaigne Studies XXX: 1-2 (2018): 69-82

Edited volumes

A Cultural History of Love in the Early Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice, co- edited with Kristine Steenbergh (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Walter Benjamin’s Hypothetical French Trauerspiel, co-edited with Hall Bjornstad, special issue of Yale French Studies 124 (2013)