Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance

Professor Calhoun teaches and researches Early Modern French literature and drama. She actively publishes in the areas of Montaigne studies and baroque theater, especially opera and dance, the history of emotions, and the history of science and technology. Her first book, Montaigne and the Lives of the Philosophers: Life Writing and Transversality in the Essais (University of Delaware Press, 2015) situates Montaigne and Diogenes Laertius in the history of life writing from the French Renaissance to the Classical Age. Her current book project, The Mechanics of the Passions in French Baroque Drama is at the intersection of the history of emotions and the history of science and technology. This project studies how the emergence of sentimentality on the French Baroque stage was influenced by stage technology, specifically machines, automata, and androids.