Chapter 4 of my current project, Designing Women: The Iconography of Charles Perrault , centers on an overlooked gem in Perrault’s oeuvre: his poetic retelling of Genesis, titled Adam ou la création de l'homme  (1697). Though best known for his fairy tales, Perrault was a consummate designer—of images, spaces, books, and ideological worlds. His production methods often underscored a major theme he was trying to express through his multi-media work. I wondered if the choice to

Device for Louis XIV. Courses de testes et de bagues. 1670. In seventeenth-century France, a device was not a gadget. It was a way of thinking. A device was a compact symbolic construction made of three parts:a symbolic image , a short inscription or motto , and an idea formed in the mind  by the relationship between the two. Devices appeared everywhere in elite visual culture—on medals, coins, tapestries, buildings, carriages, and even clothing. They were worn or displayed

In February, I’ll be giving a talk titled Designing Women: The Unillustrated Moralities of Perrault’s Fairy Tales at the Stirling Maxwell Centre in Glasgow. The central question of the talk is a deliberately provocative one: What if Perrault’s fairy-tale moralities function semiotically like devices did—like symbolic portraits that read as two sides of a coin and point to a greater truth? This question invites us to read Perrault not simply as a storyteller or moralist, but a

Illustration for Cendrillon by Charles Perrault. Unknown illustrator, 1697. Honnêteté, Women, and Knowing Through Appearance There is a moment in research when an argument stops being purely conceptual and becomes embodied. For me, Chapter 2 of my work on Perrault did not fully resolve until I stood at Versailles—moving through its spaces, studying its surfaces, and thinking seriously about what it meant, in the seventeenth century, to appear . In Cinderella, the heroine is a

What if the fairy tale heroine wasn’t just born from imagination—but from the printing press? In my new project, Constructing Eve , I return to a neglected 1697 poem by Charles Perrault— Adam ou la création de l’homme —to excavate how the figure of Eve was materially crafted at the intersection of theology, technology, and gendered design. Preparatory drawing by N. Coypel for Charles Perrault. Adam ou la création de l'homme. Though Perrault is best known as the father of th

In 1690, Charles Perrault published a book so unusual that it demanded more than a reader—it required a visitor. Le Cabinet des Beaux Arts  is not simply a text. It is a three-dimensional intellectual interior. Designed as the artistic heart of a private home, the Cabinet offers itself as a total environment—one that fuses word and image, allegory and architecture, intimacy and ideology. "Doorway to Le Cabinet." Pierre Lepautre, engraver. In Le Cabinet des Beaux Arts. 1690. [