About Alexander
Williamstown, MA
Alexander Bevilacqua (CBA ’25) is associate professor of history at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He is the author of The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment, which was selected as one of the Times Literary Supplement books of the year and awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. He is also the co-editor with Frederic Clark of Thinking in the Past Tense: Eight Conversations. His work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the American Philosophical Society, among others. He has held fellowships at Harvard University, the Library of Congress, the Warburg Institute, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. His current book project, The Face of Battle: Chivalry and the Racial Imagination, examines the performance of human difference at European princely courts.
Project: “Dance and Difference from the Moresca to the Ballet de Cour.” Scholars of early European ballet are divided between emphasizing its transcendent aspiration to make the ideal world tangible and its ties to mock warfare and chivalric antagonism. At stake in this debate is the significance of the many impersonations that the ballet inherited from late-medieval mummery. Wild men, African queens, satyrs, and Indigenous Americans appeared again and again on the stages of the ballet-besotted princely courts of seventeenth-century Europe. Bevilacqua will research the relationship of these early ballets—performed by noble amateurs as well as trained professionals—to the transgressive dances of the Renaissance, such as the rhythmic, twisting moresca. His aim is to show that the court ballet can deepen our understanding of the European race-making imagination at the beginning of the modern era.