Research

Clare is a French theatre historian of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her principal research interests include censorship, propaganda, celebrity, the French Revolution and Napoleon.

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. She remains a research associate on the project SITHERE (Succès importants du théâtre révolutionnaire).

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 will appear 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, which will appear in the Journal for War and Culture Studies.

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 (2020-2021).

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.

Teaching

In French, Clare teaches on the first-year units 'Shaping France' and 'Reading Literary and Visual Cultures', 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 runs 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
• Encounters between different cultures
• Censorship
• French culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries