France-Florida Research Institute

Jeffrey M. Leichman is William Boizelle Associate Professor in the Department of French Studies at Louisiana State University, and Director of the LSU Center for French and Francophone Studies, a member of the Centers of Excellence Network designated by the cultural services of the French Embassy.

Professor Leichman is a scholar of theatre and performance, with a disciplinary focus on the global reach of French-language stage practices during the long eighteenth century, as well as modeling and simulation applications for historically-oriented Digital Humanities. He was co-director of the VESPACE project, a six-year international DH project that resulted in a virtual reality playable experience set in an eighteenth-century Paris Fair theatre. His current work with LSU undergraduates developing a database of French-language theatrical performance in Territorial New Orleans (1803-1812) will be on display at the “1805” concert event, featuring performances of works from this repertoire in a VR acoustical model of an unbuilt theatre developed in collaboration with architect Shea Trahan, to be performed at the LSU Digital Media Center Theatre in September 2024. Professor Leichman is the co-editor of Colonialism and Slavery On Stage: Theatre and the Eighteenth-century French Caribbean (Oxford U Studies in the Enlightenment, 2021) and the author ofActing Up: Staging the Subject in Enlightenment France (Bucknell, 2016). In 2018-2019, Mr. Leichman was a Fellow in Residence at the Institut d’Etudes Avancées de Nantes.

Event organized in the context of the Theatre Revival Project