Salim Zghal

Salim Zghal is a Ph.D. Candidate in French Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation argues that an aesthetic function – the honnête Ottoman – emerges within Neoclassical French tragedy with a Turkish subject as the dramaturgic solution to the representational problem of Ottoman sovereignty and intelligibility on the French stage. The early Turk, who adheres to a single mode of representation and governance, incarnates spectacle and violence as the means of rendering political power legible. As the Neoclassical turn takes shape, tragedy increasingly requires discourse, motives, and subjects to remain intelligible to French spectators. Marking a departure from the days of the early Turk, the honnête Ottoman rises in dialogue with aesthetic notions of honnêteté and doctrine classique, ultimately providing tragedy with new norms and mechanisms of legibility. However, the honnête Ottoman migrates beyond the twilight of Neoclassical tragedy as a repurposed rhetorical and philosophical instrument across multiple genres of early Enlightenment French literature.

Salim is currently conducting research on the liminal status of Morocco in early modern France as the hinge between Europe, the Ottoman empire, and sub-Saharan Africa through its literary depictions as an independent sovereignty where alterity is rendered through multiple lenses. Salim is also researching the notion of artificial honnêteté in the seventeenth century, specifically whether alternative forms of intelligence are capable of honnêteté when humans surrender their agency or delegate judgment to them. Other research interests include gender and LGBTQIA+ studies, performance studies, nation-building, race and religion, and the Arab world.

Conference Presentations

“‘Ô spectacle mortel!’: The Dialectics of Violence and Honnêteté in Mainfray’s La Rhodienne and Mairet’s Le Grand et dernier Solyman”, The Society for Interdisciplinary French Seventeenth-Century Studies, 45^th Annual International Conference, Des Moines IA, October 2026.