Sally Mullis

I am reading early modern French literature and intellectual history for the DPhil in Medieval & Modern Languages under the supervision of Dr Raphaële Garrod at Magdalen College. My research considers how a classical analogy likening certain animal behaviours to human art forms – such as spiders' webs to weaving, birdsong to music, and nest-building to architecture – was invested with new significance in seventeenth-century French literature and natural philosophy. I am particularly interested in how discourses around these instances of ‘animal artifice’ intersected with those around the human arts as, against the backdrop of rationalism and mechanical philosophy, both explored the instinctual and embodied cognitive processes underlying the most marvellous of human and animal behaviours. Considered together, these two areas of enquiry offer a locus for uncovering alternative seventeenth-century understandings of the human-animal distinction vis-à-vis those predicated on the dualist notion of logical, ‘scientific’ reason.

Before beginning the DPhil at Oxford, I studied Biology and French at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, and earned the M.A. in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.