Delphine Calle studied French and Dutch Linguistics and Literature at Ghent University. In 2018 she obtained the degree of Doctor of Literary Studies with the dissertation entitled "Amour et applaudissements. La passion amoureuse, ses pièges et son succès dans les tragédies de Racine". This project examined how Racine engages in the seventeenth-century philosophical and theological debates about the nature and the role of love. Racine’s work, I argue, presents every inflection of love at that time, from concupiscence to celestial Eros, from self-love to générosité. Moreover, love is the key to Racine’s success, for his theatre met the demands of a new audience, which sought to express its identity through love stories.
Her new research project investigates friendship uniting opposites (of gender, age, nationality, religion, sociopolitical background) in seventeenth-century France, both as a literary topos and as a historical and political reality, sparking artistic creation. In 2018-2019, she will work as a postdoctoral researcher at Rutgers University (U.S.A.) with a fellowship of the Belgian American Educational Foundation.
