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Centre for Arts Doctoral Research Excellence

Peer Development Exchange Winners 2017

This year's Peer Development Exchange awardees are listed below. Join them to gain from their experience and broaden your skills.

Material culture as a meaningful primary source: An introduction to incorporating objects into your research.

Tabitha Baker

This workshop will provide the opportunity for students working in a range of disciplines to explore the concept of material culture. Addressing both the theoretical frameworks of material culture and the practicalities of using objects as a primary source, this workshop aims to provide PGT and PGR students with the requisite skills to begin incorporating objects into their academic research. Material culture as a discipline has developed at an accelerated pace over the course of the past two decades, with more and more scholars employing the use of museum collections in their academic research. In particular, the interdisciplinary collaboration between academics and museum curators has contributed to a greater understanding of history and the collections which have formed the basis of such research. Nevertheless, the use of objects as primary source material remains to be exploited to its full potential by academics, often due to a gap in curatorial skills and knowledge. This workshop aims to go some way to bridging that gap, and to encourage PGT and PGR students to utilise objects as a meaningful source as part of their research. By the end of this workshop participants will have engaged with the following principal topics:
  • How can objects aid academic research?
  • Familiarising oneself with the unfamiliar: methodological approaches to object analysis;
  • Practicalities of object-based research: advice for using museum, archive and private collections;
  • Object examination (practical group activity)

Thursday 9th March 10am - 12pm, Room H450, Humanities Building.

*Rescheduled for Thursday 4th May 10am - 12pm, Room H450, Humanities Building*

BOOKING NOW OPEN

Reduced Shakespeare

Ronan Hatful

This workshop will allow students to explore and understand how and why Shakespeare’s texts are reduced, conflated and repurposed in modern adaptation and performance. This will involve the study and discussion of companies who use Shakespearean reductions as their principal dramatic practice in order to either parody or pay homage to his work and life.

The two-hour workshop will follow this structure: a first half of practical engagement and discussion, followed by Q&A sessions with two of today’s most foremost Shakespearean practitioners.

  • The first hour of the workshop will take in an overview of notable practitioners, such as Charles Marowitz and Tim Crouch, and offer the students the opportunity to reduce their own Shakespearean passage down to its basic principals, in order to either expose under-explored characters more deeply or satirise the original text.
  • The second half will begin with Toby Park of Spymonkey, the internationally renowned physical theatre company whose most recent play, The Complete Deaths, directed by Tim Crouch, condensed all 75 of Shakespeare’s onstage deaths into a single production.The students will be invited to discuss a range of topics, including Symonkey’s approach to reconciling Shakespeare in the context of experimental, physical theatre and why they chose to focus on the theme of death.

  • The final half hour will focus on discussion with Austin Tichenor of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, a Californian three-man comedy troupe. They are most famous for their first play, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), in which three actors attempt to stage the entire canon in 90 minutes. Tichenor recently celebrated their 35th anniversary as a company by co-writing their newest work, William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged), in which he imagined what a lost Shakespearean masterpiece might look like, in which every notable character appears and interacts. Students are invited here to discuss the company’s progression across their history and why particular plays, characters and themes are shown themselves most ripe for reduction, parody and homage.

Wednesday 8th March, 4pm - 6pm, Wolfson Research Exchange, Rooms 1&2.

*Rescheduled to 15th March, 4pm - 6pm, Wolfson Research Exchange, Rooms 1&2*

BOOKING NOW OPEN

More to be announced...watch this space!