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Guillaume de Broux

Guillaume de Broux is a PhD candidate in the Department of French & Italian at Northwestern University and a Mellon Fellow in Global Avant-Garde & Modernist studies. Currently, he is also an Exchange Fellow at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris. 

His dissertation investigates the epistemological stakes surrounding the emergence of new artistic practices under the reign of Louis XIV, such as fairytale narrative writing, French opera, and Rococo painting. Through a combined historical and structural approach that engages critically with Jacques Rancière’s theorization of neoclassical poetic conventions, it aims to show how "minor" ways of doing fiction at once displaced and reinforced the symbolic economy of absolutism in the late seventeenth-century.

Broadly concerned with the concept of aesthetic politics, his research has led to publications on a variety of topics, including the significant affinities between the works of Antoine Watteau and Marcel Proust (Romanic Review), irony and its ironies in Charles Perrault’s Puss in Boots (Early Modern French Studies), and the many representational issues that are woven into the thematic question of decolonial resistance in Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 film Black Girl (forthcoming in French Forum).

Guillaume holds a Bachelor of Science in International Relations from the University of London as well as certificates in humanist studies from “prépa” Louis-le-Grand and Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia.