This two-day symposium on October 20th and 21st, 2016 at the University of Southern California invites scholars to explore the links between diplomacy and theater in early modern France.
Early modern diplomacy was a secret affair conducted through negotiations and documents to which very few were privy. Early modern theater, from the sixteenth century on, abounds in what Timothy Hampton has aptly termed “fictions embassy” featuring ambassadors, spies, envoys, and other mediators.
The aim of the symposium is to forge links between these two realms, the private or secret realm of diplomacy and the public (or, presented to a public) one of theater.
This conference will be ponctuate with several panels:
Antónia Szabari, University of Southern California: Friendship with the Enemy: The Rhetoric of Prolonging Diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire
Toby Wikström, Tulane University: Performing Diplomacy on the Margins: Cross-Cultural Negotiations in Early Modern French Theater
Katherine Ibbett, University College of London: The Ambassador in Translation
Timothy Hampton, University of California, Berkeley: Diplomatic Plots: The Time of Delay
Caroline Trotot, Université Paris, Marne La Vallée: Médiations diplomatiques, médiations littéraires et construction de l'identité dans l'ambassade en Flandres de Marguerite de Valois
Anna Rosensweig, University of Rochester: Affect, Mediation, and Popular Sovereignty in Sixteenth-Century Resistance Theory
Ellen McClure, University of Illinois, Chicago: Diplomacy and the Donkey in La Fontaine’s, Le pouvoir des fables
Ellen R. Welch, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: Unmasking Diplomacy: Theater and Theatricality in L’histoire amoureuse et badine du Congrès d’Utrecht (1714)
Isabelle Nathan, Archives nationales: Les Archives diplomatiques, entre forteresse du secret d’Etat et recherche historique
Indravati Félicité, Université Paris-Diderot: Le cérémonial diplomatique aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles : un théâtre politique subversif ?
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, University of Southern California: How to Do Things With Paper: Materiality, Performance and Genre in French Revolutionary Correspondence, ca. 1789-1794