Célia Abele

Célia Abele is a comparatist working at the boundaries of literature and history whose research concentrates on 18th- through 20th-century Europe, especially its French- and German-speaking regions, with a particular focus on the intersections between literature and science. History of science, intellectual history, and the study of material and visual culture provide important methodologies for her work. She is also interested in the place of literary study among other disciplines, today and in the past. She served a term at the Princeton Society of Fellows from 2020 to 2023, and she holds a Ph.D. in French and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, an M.A. in Littératures comparées from Paris IV (Paris-Sorbonne), and a B.A. in English Literature and Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin. 

She has completed the manuscript of her first book, which is called From Feuilles to Fossils: Documents of Self and World. It concerns the documentary and research practices of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georg Lichtenberg, Emile Zola, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. Sebald, arguing that they constitute a tradition originating in the Enlightenment that gives the document a central place in materializing and constituting the relationship between the self and the world. Her research on the project has been supported by a Mellon International Humanities Travel Grant, UCRHSS funding from Princeton, and the ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship.
 
Her articles and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Studies; Dix-Neuf; Romanic Review; French Studies; French Politics, Culture & Society; Nineteenth-Century French Studies; and the edited volume Repurposing Enlightenment. Among other topics, these pieces concern the representation of chemistry in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, Zola's “sedimentary” practices of documentation for The Belly of Paris, Rousseau's plant collections and how they fit into his late-life philosophy, and how reference to Balzac's natural historical framework for the Comédie humaine enabled a reconceptualization of the traditional mimetic relationship between life and literature in Proust's In Search of Lost Time.