Florence is a Phd Candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her thesis — entitled ‘Political Occultation, Aesthetic Defamiliarization, and the Figure of the Secret Society: A Response to Walter Benjamin’s essay on ‘Surrealism’ — takes the analogy that Walter Benjamin draws between Surrealism and a “secret society” as its point of departure. She explores various manifestations of the figure of the secret society in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, revealing these to be sites of tension between reason and irrationality, public and private, religious and earthly in discussions of intellectual and political history, literary-historical criticism and aesthetics. In doing so she offers a novel perspective on the attempts within the intellectual history and critical theory of the twentieth century to engage with the legacy of a particular notion of modernity arising from the eighteenth, and to develop a theory of aesthetic defamiliarization arising from the presence of tension itself.

Florence’s approach to research can be broadly categorized as an engagement with literature and art and its intersections with intellectual and cultural history, philosophy, and critical theory. She has previously written about the notion of ‘objectless’ horror in art and literature, the city and other built environments, and Kant’s aesthetic and political theory. She has taught subjects such as philosophical aesthetics, art and cultural theory, and the philosophy of history, with a focus on ideas about progress from the eighteenth century to the present.