Profile

Ainan Liu is a Ph.D. candidate in French and Italian at Princeton University, where he specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French theater. He received his B.A. in Political Science and French Studies from Duke University in 2014 and his M.A. in French and Italian from Princeton University in 2022. He recently presented a paper entitled “Imagining Inverted Worlds in Marivaux’s Experimental Theater” at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. His research interests lie in interdisciplinary approaches to French theater, in particular the application of social science concepts to literary analysis. His dissertation proposes an anthropological interpretation of early modern French tragedy and is tentatively titled Barbaric Acts in French Classical Theater (ca. 1635-1755).