Madison Mainwaring

Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies

Education

Ph.D., Yale University
M.F.A. Warren Wilson College
M.A., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
B.A., Middlebury College

Research and Teaching Interests

19th-century French and North African literature and culture, performance studies, gender studies, feminism and the archive

Biography

Madison Mainwaring specializes in nineteenth-century literature and cultural history in France and North Africa. Working at the intersections of performance studies and feminist theory, she is interested in the way minority groups have appropriated performance practices in order to be agents of their own self-representation. In her research as well as her teaching, she is committed to examining hierarchies of cultural narratives and methodological orthodoxies.

Her current project, Reclaiming the Silences of Dance: Women and Ballet in Nineteenth-Century France, examines how women spectators and dancers watched and experienced ballet onstage at the Paris Opera. Interrogating the archetype of the ballerina as muse to the male writer/artist, Mainwaring draws on archives as diverse as administrative ledgers to the clothes and shoes used in performance, showing that female performers and spectators understood dance as an important means of artistry, self-expression, and financial autonomy. In her second project, Choreographing Empire: Dance and the Maghreb, she will complete a transnational and intersectional study of gender, race and citizenship by tracing the circulation of dance practices across the Afro-European diaspora.

Mainwaring is fully committed to sharing her research on the histories of feminism and female performance with a wider audience. Since 2015, she has regularly explored such connections in media outlets such as The Atlantic, The Economist, The New York Times, The New Republic, France 24, and others, writing about Britney Spears’s dancing, Catherine Deneuve’s mystique, and strippers’ labor rights in Las Vegas, among other subjects.

Representative Publications

“The Turning Pointe : The Shoe as Gendered Technology in Nineteenth-Century Ballet." Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance, Edited by Marlis Schweitzer and Colleen Daniher, Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2024.

"The Dancer’s Pants : Travesty and Agency at Paris Opera." Decentering Dance History, Edited by Elizabeth Claire and Laura Cappelle, L’Harmattan, forthcoming 2024.

"Ballet and Celebrity at the Paris Opera, or the Dreams of the Rat." Forthcoming from Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 52:1-2, 2023-2024

"The Struggle to Save Ballet From Itself.” The New Republic, 2023.

“De la rue à la scène : trois cas d’école dans le hip-hop états-unien,” Thaêtre, 6, 2022.

“Britney Spears Has Always Fought Back. By Dancing.” The New York Times, 2022

“Speculating the Spectator : Dance and the Mise-en-scène of the Gaze at the Paris Opera.” Dossiers du Groupe de recherches interdisciplinaires sur l’histoire du littéraire, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2018.