The Institute of Dance Scholarship, Department of Dance and Boyer College of Music and Dance, with co-sponsorship from the Center for the Humanities at Temple, present Dr. Julia Prest, professor of French and Caribbean Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, who will lead her talk "Colonial Anxieties about Black Dance in pre-Revolutionary Haiti."

Prest has held previous academic positions at Oxford and Yale. A graduate in music and French, she wrote her PhD thesis on Molière’s comedy-ballets at the University of Cambridge and has published widely on many aspects of early-modern French and Caribbean theatre, including ballet and opera. Her third monograph, Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Colonial Saint-Domingue, is currently in press with Palgrave Macmillan. Prest is the creator of the trilingual (English-French-Kreyòl) performance database Theatre in Saint-Domingue, 1764-1791 and the convenor and founder of the Colonial-Era Caribbean Theatre and Opera Network (CECTON).