Women composers, librettists, and playwrights of the French Revolution (1789–1799) appropriated chattel slavery within their plays, operas, and ballets by creating a false relationship between slavery and the subjugation of women as wives and mothers. Through their imaginative texts, they advocated that both slavery and marriage placed women and enslaved people in equally unjust and unnatural circumstances. This talk reveals the antislavery narratives within Julie Candeille’s Catherine, ou La belle fermière (1792). As an opera singer and historical musicologist, Caroline posits the potential ways of interpreting the corpus of women-created antislavery theatre of the French Revolution today.

Speaker's Info:

Caroline Gleason-Mercier is a musicologist, cultural historian, and opera singer. She specializes in women-created French repertoires of the eighteenth century, focusing on the cultural politics of performance, staging, and costuming. After completing her PhD at King’s College London in 2023, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University from 2023-2024. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Fondazione 1563 per l’Arte e Cultura and a visiting scholar at the University of Turin.