Scholars@Duke

I am a PhD candidate on the French and Francophone track in the Department of Romance Studies. My work is broadly framed by currents of decolonial thought and their intersections with environmental studies in the Francophone Caribbean. I study the ways in which modes of being, sensory perception, and historicity emerge from embodied engagements with ecologies such as subsistence plots, plantation monocultures, mornes, and oceans. Grounded in French-language natural historical texts, visual and cartographic materials, and Caribbean literatures, my dissertation project traces the role of the manioc root in sustaining relational, counter-plantation modes of being human from the 16th-century to the present.

My research has been supported by a FLAS Fellowship for Haitian Kreyòl; by a short-term fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library; and by a dissertation fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia. I also spent a visiting semester at the École normale supérieure in Paris.

At Duke, I have been involved with several digital humanities initiatives, notably the projects Monograph of Haiti Map and Remembering the Middle Passage.

I designed and taught the course FRENCH 327S, "Between Nature and Culture in Francophone Caribbean Literature"; I have also taught first through third semester French language classes.