Conference Trip

This weekend I attended the Western Society for French History conference (WSFH). It was my first time at “the Western,” and I enjoyed it very much.  I decided to go to this conference instead of ASTR (American Society for Theatre Research) partly because it was closer to home and partly because it forced me to work on a project that I should be preparing to publish as an article. I presented on eighteenth-century Parisian brothel plays, with a specific focus on the relationship between prostitutes and police as represented in three plays. My panel was called “Arresting Exchanges: Constructing Identity in Police Archives.” It was a bit chaotic to start because the program indicated that we had been assigned to the same room as a different panel (on Algeria). But everyone worked efficiently to straighten out the mix-up, and we ended up with a good audience. The audience included a leading expert on elite prostitution in eighteenth-century Paris. I was citing her work in the paper, but had not met her before. So I was a little nervous. But she was very encouraging. It was especially productive to meet with historians’ resistance to using plays as historical sources. This helped me to figure out where not to send this essay, and reminded me that I do belong in Theatre Studies.

One funny thing about this conference was the etiquette around language. People kept asking permission to speak in French, or apologizing for speaking French even when their paper titles were in French in the program. I went to one panel where two speakers presented in French (with requisite apologies), and then the commenter spoke in English, and apologized for speaking in English. The same dance happened during the Q&A, with the speakers asking permission to respond in French to questions that had been asked in English. It was all very polite, but it felt a little unnecessary. 

Almost every panel I attended featured a commentary at the end, usually by a senior scholar. These were always generous and rigorous, offering lots of positive feedback as well as questions for further exploration. And the papers were generally engaging and well-presented. It was great to think about things specific to social and cultural history in the eighteenth century, and I was reminded of several texts (mainly libertine novels) that will be of interest for other projects