Emma Thiébaut

Emma Thiébaut is a PhD student at Université Paris Cité, working under the supervision of Prof. Cécile Roudeau. Her dissertation, provisionally entitled “‘I can hear your rosebush mewing’: S.O. Jewett, M.E.W. Freeman and the Zoopoetics of Queerness”, investigates the varied ways in which the private and fictional writings of some nineteenth-century American women writers entangle queer and interspecies intimacies. This allows Thiébaut to propose nineteenth-century reenvisionnings of what it means to love or to feel queer, to recover unexpected intimate alliances, and to contribute to the post-human turn in studies of nineteenth-century US literature. Also influenced by French theory and Wittgenstein’s philosophy, she uses animal studies and queer theory to ponder the limits of (human) language and what it means to write, to read and to mean.