At QSS seminar, Scott Sanders presents project on language in historical French theater

Scott Sanders, of the Department of French and Italian Studies, recently presented a project on gender and language in 17th and 18th Century French theater.   The project combines historical plays and programs and uses modern text-processing techniques.  Of the plays he studies, Professor Sanders finds that that women constituted almost a third of the cast regardless of genre.  He shows as well that that women spoke about a third of the dialogue in comedies but up to 60 percent of the dialogue in tragedies and dramas.