I am currently an Associate Professor in the Department of French and Italian and Affiliated Faculty of the Program in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. I received my B.A. in Comparative Literature and The Creative Writing Program from Columbia University, and my M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. I am a comparatist both by training and by disposition: my research explores figurations of violence in early modern French, English and Italian literature, analyzing rhetorics of suffering and brutality that shape the politics of the early modern Self and State.