Publications   Research Projects  Teaching

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(Faculté de Lettres and Institut d’Histoire de la Réformation). My doctoral thesis explored the ways in which a fashionable humanist genre—the dialogue—was deployed in the service of Protestant propaganda. It gave a corpus of unstudied sixteenth-century literature a political-theological reading which chimed with the field’s ‘religious turn’. 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 early modern visual culture, image debates, and iconoclasm. Other research interests include the history of the book and of reading; women and life writing, and more recently, the ways in which early modern literature engages with the natural world. I have 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). In 2020, after a year of teaching at the University of Lausanne, I was delighted to be asked to join Professor Isabel Karremann’s  Early Modern team, and to continue to share my love of the period’s literature with Zurich’s students. I completed my Habilitation in 2023, entitled ‘Envisioning Words in the long Seventeenth Century’ which focused on John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Reformation image debates.

Since it was founded in 2007, I have been a member of the board of the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (SAMEMES) as Treasurer and now Secretary General. In 2016 I co-organized (with Professor Olga Timofeeva) the Association’s fifth biennial conference in Zurich: ‘What is an Image in Medieval and Early England?’. unil.ch/samemes/home