Professor
Bachelor's Degree(s): B.A., French, B.A., Comparative Literature; Brown University
PhD: Ph.D., French Literature, Yale University
Phone: (225)578-6627
E-mail: jleichman@lsu.edu
Office: 404 Hodges
Jeffrey M. Leichman (he/him) is William Boizelle and Jacques Arnaud Professor in the Department of French Studies at Louisiana State University, where he also teaches in the Program in Comparative Literature. Professor Leichman’s research focuses on theatrical culture from the early modern period through the present, with three main areas of concentration in early modern European and North American colonial performance, including in Louisiana; digital modeling and simulation for historically-oriented humanities; and performance in cinema.
Professor Leichman's monograph on French-language theatre in Territorial-era New Orleans, Ornament of the City, is under advance contract with LSU Press. Professor Leichman co-edited (with Dr. Karine Bénac-Giroux) Colonialism and Slavery in Performance: Theatre and the Eighteenth-Century French Caribbean (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment/Liverpool UP). Alongside research on the relationship between theatre and the French colonial world (including pedagogical approaches to Aimé Césaire and Pierre Corneille in MLA Options for Teaching French Neoclassical Tragedy (eds. Bilis and McClure), Professor Leichman has published articles on New Wave film director Jacques Rivette in dialogue with eighteenth-century polymath philosopher Denis Diderot (French Studies 75.1) and on twentieth-century art-house star Bulle Ogier European Drama and (Performance Studies 17). Additional current research draws on consent theory to propose a new understanding of comic theatre in eighteenth-century France and England. Professor Leichman is also the author of the monograph Acting Up: Staging the Subject in Enlightenment France (Bucknell UP, 2016; reviews here).
As a digital humanist, Professor Leichman served as principal investigator for two international digital humanities projects. Professor Leichman conceived and directed the 1805 Project, a multi-modal research and performance project that includes undergraduate-centered scholarship and a live concert event featuring the digital acoustical restitution of theater planned for the New Orleans waterfront in 1805, held at LSU in Fall 2024. This project stemmed from the Virtual Theatres in the French Atlantic World initiative co-directed with Dr. Pauline Beaucé with support from the Transatlantic Research Partnership of the French Foreign Ministry's FACE Council, resulting in the publication of a peer-reviewed, open access research volume exploring new methods and approaches to theatre architecture history, Nouvelles études sur les lieux de spectacle de la première modernité (Open Book Publishers, 2024). Previously, Professor Leichman served as PI for the NEH-funded VR simulation of an eighteenth-century Paris fair theatre, VESPACE, which culminated in both a digital playable experience (downloadable from the project website) and a special issue of Digital Studies / Le Champ numériqueco-edited with Dr. Ben Samuel (UNO). This special issue showcases the innovative methodologies developed for this project, complementing publications including a study of computer-designed procedural narrative as historiography (in Modes of Play in Eighteenth-Century France, eds. Falaky and McGinnis).
Professor Leichman's scholarship and teaching have been recognized with ATLAS grants in 2013-2014 and 2022-2023, two NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grants, three TAF Undergraduate Teaching Awards at LSU (2015, 2016, 2018) and the 2017 College of Humanities and Social Sciences Robert K. Udick Undergraduate Teaching Award. In addition to invited lectures on early modern performance at universities in the US and Europe, Professor Leichman is a frequent expert reviewer for scholarly articles and monographs and served as a production editor for H-France Review from 2020-2023. In 2018-2019, Professor Leichman was a Fellow in residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Nantes, France. He is a graduate of Brown University and Yale University.
Eighteenth-century global French theatrical culture
Esthetics and politics in the French Enlightenment
Dramatic literature and acting theory (seventeenth century-present)
Theatre and cinema
Digital humanities
Social and sensory digital modeling
Inclusive pedagogy