Dr Helena Taylor

I am Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature here at Exeter where I teach French language, literature, and culture at all levels and research early modern French culture and history. My research focuses on the intellectual and literary history of early modern France, particularly the seventeenth century. I am interested in cultures of learning, women's varied intellectual practices and their reception, classical reception, cultural quarrels or 'querelles' as they are sometimes known in French, and translation studies.

My first book, published with Oxford University Press in 2017, examines the reception of the life of the ancient Roman poet Ovid in 17th-century French culture. My second book is Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (OUP, 2024): this was awarded an Honourable Mention in the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender Book Prize. I am currently leading a five-year project, Cultures of Philosophy: Women Writing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, originally awarded as a European Research Council Horizon Europe Starting Grant in the 2022 round (€1.5 million) and now funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee [grant number EP/Y006372/1].

I teach or have taught all years of undergraduate modules in French language, literature, and philosophy. I also teach for the MA in Translation Studies and the MA in Global Literatures and Cultures. From 2019-23 I co-directed Exeter's Centre for Early Modern Studies and am a founding member of the new Centre for Classical Reception. I accept PhD or post-doc proposals in any of my research areas and am always happy to supervise final-year undergraduate dissertations.

My pronouns are she/her.

Biography:

I came to Exeter in September 2015 as Lecturer in French Studies, and then held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship here before my appointment as Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature in 2023. Prior to coming to Exeter, I held a Laming Junior Research Fellowship at The Queen's College, Oxford, and completed my DPhil (2013), a Masters in European Literature (2008), and a BA in French and Classics at Oxford (2007). From 2010-11, I taught as a lectrice at Paris Sorbonne (Paris IV). I am a fellow of the Higher Education Academy.