Event Details

Hall Bjornstad, associate professor of French at Indiana University, will present “The King, His Reflection and Us: Reconsidering the Versailles Mirrors."  Ever since its opening in the early 1680s, the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles has been world famous as the most exuberant expression of the glory of the Sun King, Louis XIV. At the time, it was probably the first time those in attendance were able to see their whole reflection in a full-length mirror. This talk reinscribes this momentous event in a wider history of technology, of court society, of political display and symbolism, and of the modern self, while arguing that its most important repercussions may not yet have been recognized.

Bjørnstad is Associate Professor of French and Director of the interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. A specialist of early modern French literature and culture, he has published extensively on Blaise Pascal (including Créature sans créateur: Pour une anthropologie baroque dans les “Pensées” de Pascal, Hermann 2013), edited or coedited collective volumes on early modern plagiarism (Oslo, 2008), “Walter Benjamin’s French Trauerspiel” (Yale French Studies, 2013) and universal history (Routledge, 2018). This talk is part of a book project with the title “The Dream of Absolutism: Louis XIV and the Crisis of Royal Exemplarity,” for which he just received an NEH fellowship for the fall of 2019.