At NYU, I have the privilege of being a member of a very dynamic group of early-modern specialists, whose contribution is shaping the discipline and proving that the study of past artistic practices, including literature, is one of the most productive means of understanding the present. In the department of French, I have taught graduate and undergraduate courses and seminars on literature and theatre with an eye to visual culture and an ear to musical landscapes. Understanding the societal role and value of a work of literature, how it gives shape to a specific human experience, and how it relates to other works in time and space have been the guiding principle of my teaching philosophy.
My research and publications focus on French and Italian court spectacles, theatre, and ceremonies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My first two books about stage adaptations of the myth of Perseus and Andromeda investigate the ways in which playwrights and librettists negotiated between poetics and the necessities of the stage, between encomium and commercial strategies. This perception of theatre as a complex cultural phenomenon continues to animate my work and raises important questions regarding the creation of festivals, theatre, and opera of the Ancien Regime. It also permits me to open up questions about the status of the documents on which theatre and festival historians base their research. This last topic was the object of a special issue of Texte, a journal of literary theory and criticism, devoted to the subject of “Texte et représentation: les arts du spectacle (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles),” which I edited. My latest book, La Fête imprimée. Cérémonies et spectacles politiques (1549-1662) (Classiques Garnier, 2016), is the first comprehensive examination of French festival books focusing on their specific charge: to give shape, order and meaning to spectacles and ceremonies. Exploring issues related to print culture and the history of reading practices, it shows how they are in fact the result of an assemblage of various textual and iconographical sources, which transform the reader into an ideal spectator.