Annalisa Nicholson grew up in Colindale and attended a state grammar school. She studied French and Russian at UCL, followed by an MA in Early Modern Studies at UCL under the direction of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL). She then spent a year combining non-mainstream teaching with stints at Westminster City Archives and the Heinz Archive at the National Portrait Gallery. She completed her PhD in French, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, at the University of Cambridge in 2021 before taking up a Laming Research Fellowship at The Queen’s College, Oxford. She joined KCL as British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in October 2024. 

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Early modern literature and history
• French and Francophone literature
• Women’s writing
• Exile studies
• Transnational encounters (especially Anglo-French and Franco-Russian exchange)

Annalisa’s research takes a transnational approach to early modern history and culture with a particular emphasis on Francophone literary production. Her interests are wide-ranging and span early modern women, salons, displacement, epicureanism, libertinism, and manuscript culture. Her first book, ‘A Salon-in-Exile’ (Bloomsbury History: 2025), introduces the cosmopolitan circle of the Franco-Italian exile, Hortense Mancini, to offer a new account of co-existence and collaboration in late seventeenth-century London. As an accompaniment to this book, Annalisa has edited and translated Hortense Mancini’s letters, which will appear with Iter Press in 2025. Outside of these larger projects, she has published articles on satire in the writings of the seventeenth-century salonnière, Madeleine de Scudéry, and on epicureanism in the work of the French essayist and exile, Charles de Saint-Évremond. Her article on Hortense Mancini’s suicide, which uses the case-study of Mancini’s death to explore the stakes of speculative history, was awarded Honourable Mention for the Best Article of 2022 by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender (SSEMWG). Extending her interest in exiles, she has co-edited - with Christophe Gillain - a special issue of Renaissance Studies on ‘Exile and Innovation in the Early Modern World’. Her next major project investigates minoritization in the early modern Francophonie through analysis of the forms and styles of Huguenot women’s writings.

Teaching

Annalisa offers teaching on French literature, culture, and language, as well as early modern history, culture, and paleography.

Expertise and public engagement

Alongside her academic outputs, Annalisa enjoys participating in public-facing initiatives to promote the value of literature, history, and language-learning to wider audiences. As part of this endeavour, her research has featured in The Observer, History Today, at the Cambridge Festival, and on BBC Radio 3, as well as in international outlets:

• ‘Leading Ladies: The French tradition of the royal mistress gave new opportunities for women at the court of Charles II’, History Today, 70: 8, August 2020.
• ‘Aphra Behn’, BBC Freethinking.
• ‘Restoration Influencer’: Interview with Donna Ferguson in The Observer on Hortense Mancini and the Mazarin Salon (February 2021).
• ‘The Rise of the Royal Mistresses', Cambridge Festival.
• ‘Hortense Mancini - mätress med fäbless för kultur’ in Swedish magazine Historiskan (August 2021).

Selected publications

• A Salon-in-Exile: Hortense Mancini and the French Diaspora in Restoration London (Bloomsbury History: forthcoming in 2025).
• The Letters of Hortense Mancini: A Bilingual Edition (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, Iter Press: forthcoming in 2025).
• With C. Gillain (eds), ‘Introduction’, Exile and Innovation: Special Issue of Renaissance Studies (online available 2024; print forthcoming).
• ‘The Wordy Milieu of the Mazarin Salon: Queer Anti-Absolutism with Hortense Mancini, Charles de Saint-Évremond, and Jean de La Fontaine’, Early Modern French Studies, 46: 2 (2024).
• ‘Like Mother, like Daughter: Hortense Mancini, Duchesse de Mazarin, and Marie-Charlotte de La Porte-Mazarin, Marquise de Richelieu’, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 16: 1 (2021).