• Early modern narrative and lyrical poetry and the long Reformation 
• John Milton’s Paradise Lost, visual culture, image debates, and iconoclasm 
• Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and the natural world 
• Early modern genre theory 
• Women and life writing 
• Satire, polemic, and the public sphere

I am a Privat Dozentin and lecturer in early modern literature with a long history at the English Department in Zurich, as Assistentin (2003-2009), as the recipient of a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione award (2013-2015), and as Oberassistentin (2016-2017). After reading English at the University of Oxford, I completed a Diplôme d’Etudes Supérieures in Renaissance Literatures followed by a Doctorate at the University of Geneva. My first book, Reformation Fictions (Oxford University Press, 2011), explored the ways in which a fashionable humanist genre—the dialogue—was deployed in the service of Protestant propaganda. My second book project focuses on a giant of the literary canon John Milton and the long Reformation, particularly the ways in which his highly visual epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) engages with seventeenth-century visual culture, image debates, and iconoclasm. Other research interests include women and life writing, and more recently, the ways in which early modern literature engages with the natural world. I was Treasurer and then Secretary General of the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (SAMEMES) from 2007 to 2024, and have taught at the Universities of Geneva, Lausanne and Fribourg. In 2020, I was delighted to be asked to join Isabel Karremann’s team, and to continue to share my love of literature with Zurich’s students. 

Workshops and Conference Papers:

With Johannes Riquet I have organized three marathon readings of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene at the University of Tampere, Finland. In 2023, for the first time Zurich students participated in a three-day reading of the whole poem followed by a symposium. Four of us symposiasts have been invited to the Society for Renaissance Studies Conference in Bristol in 2025. My talk is titled ‘Human and Animal Interconnections in Book II of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene’. 

I have participated in the triennial International Milton Symposium since 2015, most recently in Toronto in 2023 where I gave a paper on ‘Picturing the Son of God in Paradise Lost’. 

In June 2025 I will be giving a talk at the Johannesevangelium in Pietismus und Aufklärung Conference in Zurich titled ‘John Milton’s Son of God and the Gospel of John’. 

1. “‘Oh, how unlike the place from whence they fell!’ John Milton’s Primordial Hell in Paradise Lost”. Space, Time, and Experience in the European Eschatological Imagination, 1400–1800. Ed. Christine Göttler and Wietse de Boer. Leiden: Brill, 2024. 
2. “God Talk: Seeing and Hearing the Dialogue in Heaven in Milton’s Paradise Lost”. Milton Studies Vol. 63: 2, 2021. 
3. ‘“The pretious life-blood of a master spirit”: Thomas Hollis’s ‘Liberty’ Books   and the Spirit and Body of John Milton’ in Words, Books, Images, and the Long Eighteenth Century: Essays for Allen Reddick. Ed. Antoinina Bevan Zlatar, Mark Ittensohn, Enit Steiner and Olga Timofeeva. John Benjamins, 2021. 
4. Antoinina Bevan Zlatar, Mark Ittensohn, Enit Steiner and Olga Timofeeva eds. Words, Books, and Images in the Long Eighteenth Century: Essays for Allen Reddick. John Benjamins, 2021.