Theater, Gender, and War in the Age of the French Revolution

FAIN: FT-278149-21

Logan James Connors
University of Miami (Coral Gables, FL 33146-2919)

Research and writing two chapters of a book on French theater, gender, and the military in revolutionary France from 1756-1804.

A stipend would provide me with two months of dedicated writing to draft two chapters of a book on theater and the military in eighteenth-century France and its empire. My project unearths the relations between the military and the theater in France and its colonial spaces from the Seven Years War (1756-1763) to Napoleon’s coronation in 1804. Grounded in theater and performance studies, in literary analysis of drama, and in cultural, military and gender history, it is the first examination of theater’s engagement with military cultures in France and of the military’s influence on the codes of drama and theatrical performance. The stipend will allow me to draft two chapters about theater, gender, and war during the French Revolution: a chapter in which I read military “event plays” through the lens of theories of reenactment and repetition; and, a chapter that draws from the same corpus to describe the role of women in the Revolutionary war effort and its on-stage representations.