The international conference Rethinking Early Modern Sites of Spectacle seeks to provide an overview of new perspectives on early modern theatre history, with a specific emphasis on the study of the spaces and locations of public entertainment, their usages, their integration into city life and their place in the collective imaginary. The study of these spaces affords a privileged view not only of the material and artistic conditions of performing arts, but also of the significance for the development of an early modern urban sociability of theatrical structures and the artistic practices they housed and fostered. While study of theatrical architecture has long played an important role in theatre history, the increased accessibility of computer-based processes and digital methods has significantly impacted this aspect of the field, adding a wide variety of modeling tools to augment traditional approaches to analysis and restitution. New techniques allow researchers to visualize and comprehend the theatrical activity hosted by these sites, while also offering a vastly expanded sensory experience of long-lost spaces.

The main theoretical focus of this conference is encapsulated in the notion of the virtual, inasmuch as this concept not only allows for an analysis of research tools based on new technologies (virtual reality, 3D printing, video games, GIS…), but also provides an opportunity to re-think underexploited sources (e.g., plans and descriptions of virtual or never constructed theatres) as well as familiar sources in need of reevaluation (imaginaries of theatrical space in fiction, archives concerning the material life of performance). As a research paradigm in theatre historiography, the technologies and methodologies of the virtual allow us to situate this work within larger disciplinary consideration of how knowledge is mediated and transmitted, engaging questions of pedagogy, patrimonialization, and artistic creation. This in turn entails important institutional consequences, including a de-siloing of research endeavors to facilitate projects that require collaboration between scholars with vastly different competencies and sometimes divergent outcome goals. Questioning and renewing modalities of research in theatre history is thus one of the conference’s goals, alongside the elaboration of new possible models for recasting the historian’s work in a rapidly transforming higher education and research landscape.

This conference also serves as the conclusion of the transatlantic project Virtual Theatres in the French Atlantic World: Spectacle and Urbanism (18^th-19^th centuries), financed by the Thomas Jefferson Fund of the French-American Cultural Exchange (FACE) Council of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Our proposed research hypothesis holds that the re-creation of theatre spaces (through digital tools, amongst others), can help us better understand the ways in which cities have historically envisioned sites of spectacle as an index of cultural value. Virtuality plays an important role in this investigation, evidenced as much in our interest in unbuilt projects that remained in paper form, as in our recourse to VR to create immersive sensory models of these spaces. This project seeks to highlight several kinds of virtuality – theatrical, historical, technological – which are inherent in our understanding of the past, just as they are essential drivers of progress in contemporary humanities research.