DPhil student in Modern Languages at Trinity College, Oxford, under the supervision of Wes Williams.
Rachel’s project explores the overlap of medicine and folklore in Rabelais’s texts. It takes as its focus Rabelais’s haptic medical encounters, exploring them from an anthropological perspective to put forward a new reading of the humoral body in Rabelais’s texts – particularly how it shapes, and is shaped by, its cognitive environment, the heterogeneous world of early modern France. The medical encounter can then set up a fresh encounter between us, as readers, and Rabelais’s texts. From Michaelmas 2019, Rachel will be the co-convener of the French Graduate Seminar.