Sabine Chaouche is a scholar expert in the history of theatre, intellectual history (histoire des idées) and also social and economic history.
She studied at the University of Oxford (New College), where she completed a DPhil in Social and Economic History [1] (2017) and at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne where she completed a PhD in Literature and Theatre (1999)[1] and an Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (2005).[2] She taught French literature and theatre in Oxford and Kuala Lumpur.
Chaouche is a researcher primarily known for her work in cultural history, but also in intellectual history, as she has extensively examined the concept of the "theatrical," the concept of the "actor," the self in theatre, and more broadly, the philosophy of the Actor in the Age of Enlightenment.[3] Her books on acting and declamation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have become reference works.[4][5][6] She has meticulously analysed an extensive array of acting theories spanning from the 1650s to the 1800s and is regarded as 'one of the most important representatives of current research into the history of the French theatre of the 17th and 18th centuries'.[7] In recent years, she examined staging, creation, performance, masculinity, and the economy of entertainments.
Her multidisciplinary area of expertise includes gender studies, the history of consumption and trade in nineteenth-century Europe, as well as Oxford students' daily life in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She heads the book series "Biographies" and "Dictionaries and Synthesis" (17th and 18th centuries) at Éditions Classiques Garnier. She created the journal European Drama and Performance Studies. She also co-leads a major project, Les Contemporaines (1640-2000), which focuses on the history of female perfomers (to be published by Éditions Classiques Garnier).