Research

Clare is a French theatre historian of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her principal research interests include censorship, propaganda, human rights, and celebrity from the end of the Ancien Regime, through the Revolution and Napoleonic period, to the Restoration.

Clare arrived at Bristol in 2017, after completing her PhD at the University of Warwick and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Université Clermont Auvergne. Her first monograph, Tragedy and Nation in the Age of Napoleon, appeared in 2020 with Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment. Here, she used theatre as a lens to analyse how multiple agents – audiences, authors, actors, state officials, and Napoleon – employed tragedy to help reconstruct the French nation after the Revolution. Clare’s second monograph, Theatre and Censorship in France from Revolution to Restoration, is the result of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and is currently forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Clare has also co-edited three projects: Celebrity Across the Channel, 1750-1850 (2021) with Anaïs Pedron, Un Engagement en vers et contre tous: servir les révolutions, rejouer leurs mémoires (1789–1848) (2021) with Jérémy Decot, and a special issue of Journal for War and Culture Studies with Annelies Andries on ‘Theatrical Encounters during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’ (2021), which was the result of a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant.

In 2022, Clare was chosen as a BBC/Arts and Humanities Research Council 'New Generation Thinker' (with appearances on BBC radio including The Essay (2023) and The Long View (2024)) and as a Franco-British Young Leader. In 2024, she became a member of the UK Young Academy.

Clare is also a member of the editorial board for Modern and Contemporary France and Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.

Teaching

In French, Clare teaches on the first-year units 'Shaping France' and 'Representations of Francophone Cultures', 'Global French', and on the fourth-year translation unit. She runs the second year unit 'French Drama', and the fourth-year units 'The Censor's Scissors, 1750-1830' and 'Revolution, Theatre, and the Public Sphere, 1789-1799'. At School level, she has taught on the 'Introduction to the Study of Cultures', and on the MA courses 'Institutions of Culture' and 'Cultural Encounters'. Clare is very keen on cross-Faculty teaching and has been involved with the third-year English unit 'Celebrity Cultures' and the MA in Migration and Mobility Studies.

Clare is likewise keen to promote Modern Languages education and has run Access to Bristol sessions as well as an 'Insight into French Theatre' workshop at the Theatre Collection.

Clare welcomes enquiries about potential postgraduate research projects, especially in the following fields:

• French theatre
• French culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• Censorship
• Propaganda
• Encounters between different cultures