Madison Mainwaring is assistant professor of French and Francophone studies who specializes in nineteenth-century literature and cultural history in France and North Africa. She has been a Kellogg Institute faculty fellow since 2024.
Working at the intersections of performance studies and feminist theory, Mainwaring is interested in the way minority groups have appropriated performance practices in order to be agents of their own self-representation. In her research as well as her teaching, she is committed to examining hierarchies of cultural narratives and methodological orthodoxies.
Mainwaring has shared her research on the histories of feminism and women in performance through refereed publications such as Nineteenth-Century French Studies and Thaêtre, and in media outlets such as The Atlantic, The Economist, The New York Times, The New Republic, France 24, and others.
She has won both the Naomi Schor and the Larry Schehr Memorial Awards from Nineteenth-Century French Studies. Her research and writing have earned her a MacDowell Fellowship, the Mary Isabel Sibley Fellowship of Phi Beta Kappa, the Chateaubriand Fellowship of the French Embassy, and the Marguerite Peyre Prize from Yale University.
Mainwaring holds a PhD from Yale University.