Dr Clare F I Siviter

PhD (Warw.), BA (Warw.)

  • BS8 1TE

Personal profile

Research interests

Research

Clare is a French theatre historian of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her principal research interests include censorship, propaganda, human rights, and celebrity from the end of the Ancien Regime, through the Revolution and Napoleonic period, to the Restoration.

Clare completed her BA and AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Warwick. In her thesis, she used theatre as a lens to analyse how multiple agents – audiences, authors, actors, state officials, and Napoleon – employed tragedy to help reconstruct the French nation after the Revolution. The monograph resulting from the significant revision of this thesis appeared in 2020 with Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment under the title Tragedy and Nation in the Age of Napoleon.

In 2016, Clare was appointed as an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at Warwick and then held a post at the Université Clermont Auvergne as a postdoctoral fellow from 2016 to 2017, where she worked on the THEREPSICORE project, a digital humanities project tracing theatrical life in the French provinces from 1791 to 1813. 

In 2017, Clare organised a conference with Anais Pedron (QMUL) at the institute of Historical Research on Antoine Lilti’s conception of celebrity in Britain and France. Clare and Anais then co-edited a volume of papers on this topic, Celebrity-Across the Channel, 1750-1850, that appeared with the University of Delaware Press in 2021.

Whereas Clare’s earlier research principally focused on Paris, her current research investigates theatre in the French provinces and its diffusion across Europe during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period. To this end, she developed the Faculty of Arts Transnational Theatrical Exchange 1750-1850 research cluster at Bristol (2017-2018), and then collaborated with Dr Annelies Andries (Oxford) on a project entitled 'Theatre on the move in times of conflict, 1750-1850'. Clare and Annelies co-edited special issue of papers from this project, published in the Journal for War and Culture Studies.

In 2022, Clare was chosen as a BBC/Arts and Humanities Research Council 'New Generation Thinker' (with appearences on BBC radio including The Essay (2023) and The Long View (2024)) and as a Franco-British Young Leader. In 2024, she became a member of the UK Young Academy.

Clare is currently working on a second monograph, provisionally entitled 'Surveilling the Stage: Censorship and Subjectivity in the Age of Revolution, 1788-1818', for which she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2019-2022).

From 2016 to 2019, Clare was the Web and Social Media Officer for the Association of Modern and Contemporary France (www.asmcf.org). She is now a member of the editorial board for Modern and Contemporary France and Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.

Teaching

In French, Clare teaches on the first-year units 'Shaping France' and 'Representations of Francophone Cultures', 'Global French', and on the fourth-year translation unit. She runs the second year unit 'French Drama', and the fourth-year units 'The Censor's Scissors, 1750-1830' and 'Revolution, Theatre, and the Public Sphere, 1789-1799'. At School level, she has taught on the 'Introduction to the Study of Cultures', and on the MA courses 'Institutions of Culture' and 'Cultural Encounters'. Clare is very keen on cross-Faculty teaching and has been involved with the third-year English unit 'Celebrity Cultures' and the MA in Migration and Mobility Studies.

Clare is likewise keen to promote Modern Languages education and has run Access to Bristol sessions as well as an 'Insight into French Theatre' workshop at the Theatre Collection.

Clare welcomes enquiries about potential postgraduate research projects, especially in the following fields:

  • French theatre
  • French culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
  • Censorship
  • Propaganda
  • Encounters between different cultures

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