Dr Frédérique Aït-Touati
Dr Frédérique Aït-Touati
Supernumerary Teaching Fellow in French
Email: Frédérique Aït-Touati
Research Interests
The main focus of my research is early modern literature and science, and especially the relationship between those domains. I am interested in the poetics of the scientific genres, the history of astronomy and optics, the history of fiction and the relationship between fiction and knowledge. My first book (The University of Chicago Press, forthcoming) offers an account of the ways in which astronomers and cosmological writers made themselves reliable and trustworthy interpreters of the heavens in the great age of telescopic discovery. The aim is to reinterpret the relation between fiction and cosmological authority, using close readings of the literary techniques involved in the accounts of celestial journeys, including works by Johannes Kepler, Francis Godwin, John Wilkins, Cyrano de Bergerac, Robert Hooke, Margaret Cavendish, Christiaan Huygens and Fontenelle.
I am currently editing a book on science and narrative in the early modern period, more specifically on the scientific anecdotes, and I am co-writing a book on ‘picturability’ and the limits of representation in the 17th century.
Teaching Interests
I give seminars and tutorials on French literature and thought, specializing in writing from the early modern period. I teach the first-year literature course (all those texts before 1800) and all seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century papers in later years.
Before joining St John’s College, I worked as a Career Development Fellow at New College and was a lecturer at the Sorbonne University in Paris. I hold an affiliate Professor position at Sciences-Po Paris.
