Dr Rebecca Short

Rebecca Short is a Junior Research Fellow at Blackfriars. Since completing her doctorate in 2023, she has held a lectureship at Worcester College, Oxford and a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Université libre de Bruxelles, supported by the Fondation Wiener Anspach.

Her research interests span late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature, with a focus on character formation in the private and public spheres. Her doctoral research explored self-fashioning in the work of Louis-Antoine Caraccioli, exploring tensions between authenticity and artifice in Enlightenment conceptions of selfhood. She is preparing a critical edition of Caraccioli’s Lettres à une illustre morte (1770) for publication with Classiques Garnier. Her current project turns to the history of emotions, exploring how the notion of self-esteem was developed, represented and negotiated in literature and philosophy through the dynamics of social relationships.