Madison Mainwaring is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her work explores dance, performance, gender, and the archive in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France.
Her first book, The Dancer’s Archive: Women and Ballet in Nineteenth-Century France, is under contract with Yale University Press. She is also at work on a book about the women of the French New Wave, as well as a research project on the development of pointe shoes.
Mainwaring’s research and writing have been supported by the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, MacDowell, the Mary Isabel Sibley Fellowship of Phi Beta Kappa, and the Chateaubriand Fellowship of the French Embassy. She has received both the Larry Schehr and Naomi Schor Memorial Awards from Nineteenth-Century French Studies. Her criticism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, The Economist, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and elsewhere.
News
2026 Robert B. Silvers Foundation Grant
Awarded for a book in progress on the women of the French New Wave.
Recently published in Écrire l’histoire
“Quand la danseuse écrit l’histoire: le traité de danse comme pratique historiographique au XIXe siècle“
