Florence March

Florence March is Professor in Renaissance and Restoration Drama at University Paul-Valéry, Montpellier (France), director of the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neo-Classical Age and the Enlightenment (IRCL), a joint research unit of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Université Paul-Valéry, and co-editor-in-chief of Cahiers Élisabéthains. A Journal of English Renaissance Studies. Her research currently focuses on Shakespearean stage configurations in twentieth- and twenty-first centuries Europe, particularly in festivals, and the relationship between stage and audience or ‘pact of performance’. She has published extensively on Shakespeare’s structuring function in southern France festivals in journals (Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Shakespeare Studies, Litteraria Pragensia…), in book chapters (The Shakespearean World, Routledge, 2017, Shakespeare and the Supernatural, MUP, 2020), in her monograph Shakespeare au Festival d’Avignon (2012) and in the book she has co-edited with Nicoleta Cinpoes and Paul Prescott, Shakespeare on European Festival Stages, forthcoming from Bloomsbury/Arden.

Her collaborations with the most important two French theatre festivals in terms of attendance and international visibility, the Avignon Festival and Le Printemps des comédiens (The Actors’ Spring) in Montpellier, which both claim to be democratic festivals, has led her to engage with Shakespeare and citizenship. In 2016 she has launched with Janice Valls-Russell and Jean Varela, the director of Montpellier’s festival, a research action programme on Shakespeare and education in six high schools, which has been included in a national framework agreement with the French Culture Ministry, and has led Janice and Florence to join a research network of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) on education issues. Florence has authored a book chapter on this experience, for a volume forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She is also a member of the international advisory board of the “Cambridge Elements in Shakespeare and Pedagogy” series. She has followed closely the prison programme led by Olivier Py, the director of the Avignon Festival as well as a distinguished writer, theatre director and actor, between 2014 and 2021. Py has initiated inmates from the male penitentiary of Avignon – Le Pontet to theatre practice through weekly workshops leading to productions of Shakespeare and Ancient Greek tragedies, which they perform behind bars, as well as out of prison, during the festival. She was recently invited to give a paper on this programme at a seminar of Sorbonne-Université and has authored a contribution for the next issue of the academic journal Sillages critiques.