Madison Mainwaring

Madison Mainwaring is a scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French culture whose research focuses on performance, gender, material culture, and the archive. Her work asks how embodied and ephemeral forms of knowledge—particularly those produced by women—can reshape histories traditionally constructed from written and visual sources. Her first book, The Dancer’s Archive: Women and Ballet in Nineteenth-Century France, is under contract with Yale University Press. Drawing on dancers’ memoirs and correspondence, contracts and legal records, dance manuals, choreography, and material objects, the book reconstructs nineteenth-century French ballet from the perspective of the women who made it. It argues for dancers as producers of artistic and historical knowledge and explores the body itself as an archive through which technique, memory, and aesthetic practice were transmitted. 

 

Mainwaring is also developing The Pointe Shoe: Women’s Artistry and the Making of Beauty in Ballet, a material history of pointe work that examines the pointe shoe as a technology shaped by dancers’ embodied expertise. Her research extends into twentieth-century French cinema. She is currently at work on a book on the women of the French New Wave, also under contract with Yale University Press. Drawing on archival research and interviews with surviving participants, the project reconsiders the New Wave through the artistic labor and experiences of the women who helped create it. 

 

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. Alongside her scholarly work, Mainwaring writes criticism and essays for general audiences. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Economist, The New Republic, and other publications.