My work has been featured by The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Baffler, and The Paris Review Daily, among other publications. I’ve written about Britney Spears’s dancing, Catherine Deneuve’s mystique, strippers’ labor rights in Las Vegas, Baudelaire’s favorite paintings, and the wardrobe of a famous duchess.
I am currently an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. My academic research focuses on feminism, performance and the archive in the U.S., France and North Africa, from the nineteenth century to the present day. In my current project, I interrogate the archetype of the ballerina as muse to the male writer/artist, asking how we can reclaim the silences of dance to find women’s perspectives which have been written out of the historical record. I have been the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, the Naomi Schor and Larry Schehr Memorial Awards (Nineteenth-Century French Studies), the Mary Isabel Sibley Fellowship (Phi Beta Kappa), the Chateaubriand (French Embassy), and the Marguerite Peyre Prize (Yale Department of French). My articles have been published in Thaêtre, Performance Research, and Nineteenth-Century French Studies.
I am writing a collective biography of the actresses of French New Wave cinema, titled Band Apart: The Women of the New Wave (under contract with Public Affairs in North America and Bloomsbury Continuum in the UK).
I previously taught in Paris at Sciences Po and the USF/Barnard “Dance in Paris” program, leading seminars on the histories of dance, gender, and celebrity. I also volunteered as a French language instructor at the Association Keur Kamer, teaching beginner and intermediate classes to refugees and asylum seekers.
I hold a Ph.D. from Yale University, a M.A. in History from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, a M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College, and a B.A. from Middlebury College.
Header image courtesy of Stephanie Mainwaring.
Madison Mainwaring 