Share
Senior Lecturer in French, University of Cambridge; Associate Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement
Having studied for a year in Paris at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Jenny returned as a postgraduate to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she had read French and German as an undergraduate. Her PhD focussed on the history of reading and the theory of narrative with reference to autobiographical fiction of the French eighteenth century. She has since continued to publish on the history of the ‘rise’ of the modern novel but she have worked increasingly on early globalisation and intercultural relations in the age of Enlightenment.
Recent publications include Remapping the Rise of the European Novel (SVEC 2007: 10); (with Cecil Courtney) Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes: colonialism, networks and global exchange (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, October 2015); ‘Eighteenth-century Foreign Imports’ in The Oxford History of the Novel, vol. 2, ed. Karen O’Brien and Peter Garside (OUP, 2015); ‘Castles for Sale? Picaresque itineraries and the eighteenth-century French novel’ in The Picaresque novel in Western Literature (CUP, 2015); ‘Turkish Delight? The Confecting of Turkish Theatrical Entertainment for Ottoman guests in France’, Esprit Créateur (2013).
Jenny has recently completed a critical edition of Book X of Raynal’s eighteenth-century Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes – arguably the first major example of a world history, probing the social, economic and political consequences of European colonialism. The project on which she is currently working concerns the multilingualism of the Enlightenment and the role played by travellers and refugees in the transnational exchange of books and ideas.