Dr Julia Prest, Lecturer
Contact Details
jtp22@st-andrews.ac.uk
Phone: 01334 463646
Office: Buchanan 307
Research and Teaching
Julia Prest's research focuses on two related areas: the theatre and the culture of the early-modern period, particularly the seventeenth century. She wrote her PhD on Molière's comedy-ballets, comparing early performances at the French court (at which Louis XIV was always present and sometimes danced) with subsequent performances in the public theatre in Paris (from which the king was conspicuously absent). Julia's second major project culminated in her monograph, Theatre under Louis XIV: Cross-casting and the Performance of Gender in Drama, Ballet and Opera, published by Palgrave in 2006. In her current book project, provisionally entitled Dangerous Illusions and Unwelcome Truths: Tartuffe in an Age of Absolutism, she broadens the question of theatrical controversy in the seventeenth century by arguing that the theatre, sitting on a critical faultline between reality and illusion, was constantly in tension with the supposed absolute truths on which the ancien régime rested. Taking the Tartuffe controversy as her case study, she argues that the Church, the Monarchy and the Theatre were all theatrical institutions using similar methods to convince much the same public of often very different "truths". Julia has published on a variety of other, related subjects including witchcraft and the Affair of the Poisons, medical satire in the work of Molière, the castrato singer, and court ballet as a hypothetical means of religious reconciliation during the wars of religion.