A candidate for the Ph.D. in French, Katherine Ibbett turns in her dissertation to the relationship between theater and politics in the first half the French seventeenth century, suggesting that both forms of representation can be seen as rethinking their relation to the subject’s problematic body. Titled “The Bodies of Politics: Spectacle and Secrecy in French Theater, 1624-1660,” the dissertation focuses on the neoclassical stage, where a new aesthetic, under the aegis of politicians such as Richelieu, comes into being; it suggests that the neoclassical body must be understood in relation to contemporary political theory and that writings about both theater and politics balance between spectacle and secrecy as they begin to consider the notion of an audience.