Sciences Po Lille is happy to welcome Dr Guy Spielmann for a class on “Politics as spectacle from Alcibiades to Volodymyr Zelenskiy”.

Born in Marseille, France, Guy Spielmann (Ph.D. Vanderbilt University) teaches French and Performing Arts at Georgetown University. While he joined the Georgetown faculty in 1994, he has also held visiting positions in various French institutions: in the Department of Drama at the Université de Strasbourg (then Marc Bloch/Strasbourg II, 2001-2003), in the Department of Performing Arts at the Université Paris-Ouest (then Paris X-Nanterre, 2001), in the Department of Performing Arts and Literature at the Université Grenoble-Alpes (then Stendhal-Grenoble III, 2011-12), at the Institut de Sciences Politiques ("Sciences Po") in Grenoble (2012), and lately at the Institut de Sciences Politiques in Lille (since 2017).

His scholarly interests cover Early-Modern European performing arts broadly conceived, with a particular focus on stagecraft and non-literary genres such as opera, fairground theater and commedia dell'arte. He has also worked extensively on various forms of contemporary popular culture, notably comics and bandes dessinées. More recently, his research has focused on a theoretical model of spectacle as an essential component of social life, and he is currently completing a comprehensive work on a possible "science of spectacle" under the working title, Spectacle Events.

He has published over 90 articles and chapters in journals and collected volumes, as well as Le Jeu de l'Ordre et du chaos (2002), a study of the relationships between comedy and socio-political order in the later part of Louis XIV's reign, and Parades (2006), on 18th-century farces performed on domestic stages. In 2018 he coedited the yearly issue of Dix-Huitième Siècle on "Une Société de spectacle." He is currently editing at Classiques Garnier (Paris) the dramatic works of Charles Dufresny, a leading figure of the French Regence period.