Yann Robert

Yann Robert’s work is primarily concerned with the intersection of literature, justice and politics in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 2010. While at Princeton, he was the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship (2004-2005), a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship (2005-2009), and a Whiting Fellowship (2009-2010).

His current book project examines the aesthetic, social and political implications of the rise in eighteenth-century France of a remarkably ritualistic brand of theater, one that no longer staged distant or fictitious stories but sought instead to reenact current events, down to the smallest details. This study explores the various functions of such a theater -- culturally: as a site of national memory, or as one of cathartic forgetting; politically: as a democratic forum, or as an instrument of state propaganda; and legally: as a popular tribunal, or as a travesty of justice -- in an attempt to better understand the unprecedented intertwining of politics, justice and drama in the years before and during the French Revolution.

Yann Robert’s critical edition of Jean-Louis Laya’s revolutionary play L’Ami des Lois, co-edited with Mark Darlow, was published in 2011 by the Modern Humanities Research Association. Other scholarly publications include articles on Rabelais’ Gargantua, Rotrou’s Saint Genest, Diderot’s Entretiens sur le Fils naturel and Paradoxe sur le Comédien, Flaubert’s Tentation de saint Antoine, and on the institution of the “claque” in nineteenth-century French theater.

In 2011-2012, Yann Robert will teach two classes: in the Winter, an advanced seminar entitled “French Theater through the Ages,” and in the Spring, the IHUM lecture course “Epic journeys, modern quests.”