Book Projects
I am currently at work on two book projects: a monograph and an edited volume.
Writing Claustrophobia
Enclosure and the Emergence of Medicalized Anxiety in France
by Kathryn A. Haklin
Before “claustrophobia” entered medical vocabulary, French writers were already crafting vivid narratives of enclosure and confinement. In Baudelaire’s poetry, the shifting urban landscape of mid-century Paris takes on a suffocating cast, its sky closing over the city like the lid of a coffin. Hugo’s Les Misérables and The Toilers of the Sea, the natural world itself becomes a trap, ensnaring protagonists in deaths by quicksand and drowning. Verne’s extraordinary voyages turn vehicles of exploration into chambers of confinement, whether soaring through outer space or traversing ten thousand leagues beneath the sea. Zola, in turn, cages his characters within the suffocating confines of spaces that define modern life itself: the glittering department store, the rumbling locomotive, and the depths of a coal mine.
Writing Claustrophobia: Enclosure and the Emergence of Medicalized Anxiety in France explores how the cultural imagination of confinement in literature paved the way for the medical definition of “claustrophobia,” coined in 1879 at the Faculté de Médecine in Paris. Even before the term entered medical discourse, French writers were already articulating an emerging anxiety of confinement. In Writing Claustrophobia, I offer historically grounded close readings of works by Baudelaire, Hugo, Verne, and Zola to demonstrate the varied ways in which these authors persistently staged scenes of spatial enclosure. I argue that French writers mobilize what would later be called “claustrophobia” to grapple with the sociopolitical tensions of a rapidly modernizing France, from the pressures of urban renewal and industrial growth to anxieties over environment, empire, and social change.
Research for this project has been generously funded by a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis, a Gilman Fellowship (Johns Hopkins University) and fellowship year at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris - Ulm), and an Alexander Grass Humanities Institute Graduate Fellowship (Johns Hopkins University).
Manuscript currently in preparation.
Image: Charles Marville, Passage de l'Opéra, vue prise de la rue Lepeletier, 9ème arrondissement, Paris. 1865–68. Paris Musées, Public Domain
Spatial Imagination and Modernity in European Francophone Culture during the Long Nineteenth Century
Critical Interiority
Eds. Dominique Bauer, Jill Cornish, Alexandre Dubois, and Kathryn A. Haklin
The edited volume Spatial Imagination and Modernity in European Francophone Culture during the Long Nineteenth Century: Critical Interiority explores the concept of critical interiority in literature, art, and architecture within European francophone culture, spanning the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries.
As a lived, imagined, or conceptualized interior space, critical interiority initially suggests a duality between interior and exterior spaces. However, this division is simultaneously destabilized, to the point where the distinction between the two spatial categories nearly dissolves. This paradox forms a lens through which modern subjectivity is analysed as an interiority. By examining examples of critical interiority found in architecture, literature, and visual art, the chapters in this volume illuminate the fundamental tensions of modernity regarding the subject and its relationship to authenticity, gender, identity, memory, nature, privacy, sociability, and temporality.
Set at the intersections of various critical frameworks, this book offers a unique and interdisciplinary perspective on space. It will be of interest to researchers in the fields of nineteenth-century literature and architecture, France and Belgium, general cultural history, domesticity and the city, art history and aesthetic theory, literary genres and comparative literature.
In production. Forthcoming in June 2026 with Routledge for the Spatial Imageries in Historical Perspective series.
Image: Georges-Félix Garen, Embrasement de la tour Eiffel. 1889. Paris Musées, Public Domain.