Madison Mainwaring

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 has won both the Naomi Schor and the Larry Schehr Memorial Awards from Nineteenth-Century French Studies. Her research and writing have earned her a MacDowell Fellowship, the Mary Isabel Sibley Fellowship of Phi Beta Kappa, the Chateaubriand Fellowship of the French Embassy, and the Marguerite Peyre Prize from Yale University.

Mainwaring is fully committed to sharing her research on the histories of feminism and women in 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 topics including Britney Spears’s dancing, Catherine Deneuve’s mystique, and the wardrobe of a famous duchess. Her collective biography of French New Wave actresses is under contract with Public Affairs in the US and Bloomsbury Continuum in the UK.