Luke wrote a PhD in French Studies under the supervision of John O’Brien and Kathryn Banks, and graduated in 2017.
I wrote my thesis on Montaigne, the sixteenth-century essayist, and sought to show that his Essais develop a new way of writing doubtfully – a new manner of communicating all the contradictory uncertainty that makes us up. I argued that this new conception of ‘doubtful truth-telling’ was a response to the social crisis that gripped France during the Wars of Religion.
As of 2024, I am the Gerard Davis Fellow in Early Modern French at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. I recently published a monograph based on my PhD thesis – Writing Doubt in Montaigne’s Essais (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) – and I am now working on the history of precarity in early modern France. I’m particularly interested in how an obscure, technical bit of jurists’ jargon, ‘precarium’, a word for a type of loan, suddenly became a key, contentious term in political debates about tyranny, servitude, and popular sovereignty.
Where to begin! I loved my PhD studies. My supervisors were great – they played such an important role in shaping my postgraduate experience. They were both incredibly supportive and provided wonderfully helpful direction and guidance. John’s expertise on all things Montaigne was invaluable, and Kathryn’s work on cognitive studies of early modern literature significantly influenced my own approach.
The research environment at Durham is fantastic at bringing people together across disciplinary and linguistic perspectives. I found the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies to be an incredibly nurturing and supportive home for my research project: it has shaped my sense of being first and foremost an early modernist, and encouraged me to situate my studies of sixteenth-century texts, usually in French but also in Latin, within a broader European and interdisciplinary framework. Joining the postgraduate Medieval and Early Modern Student Association as a committee member really enriched my studies and my sense of academic community, complementing college and departmental support wonderfully.
After the PhD, I held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at King’s College London, with a project on ‘franchise’ and frank/free speech in early modern France, followed by a four-year Early Career Fellowship at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. I now hold a permanent fellowship at St Hilda’s.
/prod01/prodbucket01/media/durham-university/departments-/modern-languages-amp-cultures-school-of/83288-2-1996X751.jpg)