Theatre and Performance Studies News
TOP STORY: TaPRA 2025 Conference to be hosted at Warwick
We're delighted to announce that the annual Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) conference will be hosted by Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick between 27 and 29 August 2025. The conference will mark both the 20th birthday of TaPRA and the 50th anniversary of Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick. Our conference keynotes, plenary panels, artistic activity, conference dinner and programmed events will speak to the themes of milestones and markers, focussing on celebrations, festivities, spectacle and joy. We'll look forward to welcoming you to Warwick next year!
To keep up to date with the conference plans, please visit our dedicated TaPRA pages here.
Professor Jim Davis awarded £600,000 AHRC grant to research Theatre and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century
An AHRC grant of approximately £600,000 has been awarded to Professor Jim Davis as Principal Investigator and to Professor Kate Newey (Exeter University) as Co-Investigator for a research project on Theatre and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century. The project will be based at Warwick in Theatre and Performance Studies. Two named postdoctoral full-time research fellows will also be attached to the project for its three-year duration: Dr Pat Smyth, an art historian specialising in the relationship between art and theatre in nineteenth-century France, who will be based at Warwick, and Dr Kate Holmes (who has a specialist interest in circus and aerial performance), based at Exeter. Bristol University’s Theatre Collection and Exeter University’s Bill Douglas Museum will be project partners, collaborating in the mounting of exhibitions and conferences.
Prof. Jim Davis edits new collection of Dickensian Dramas
Dickensian Dramas: Plays from Charles Dickens Volume 2, edited by Jim Davis, has just been published by Oxford University Press. Volume 1, which appears simultaneously, was edited by Jacky Bratton of Royal Holloway College, London.
Jim’s chapter on ‘Social Functions’ in A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Empire 1800-1920, edited by Peter Marx and published by Bloomsbury, has also just appeared.
Prof Jim Davis wins the TaPRA David Bradby Award for Research in International Theatre and Performance
The Department is delighted to announce that Prof. Jim Davis has won The David Bradby TaPRA Award for Research in International Theatre and Performance 2017 for Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
From TaPRA: 'The judges felt that the book moved adroitly across concept, example (actor), and exemplification (illustration) to account for the reciprocity of interest, nomenclature, and patronage between Georgian-era performers and painters. Without a shred of pedantry readers are coached in the criteria by which to understand what it means for a painter to capture something “inherently theatrical” about a specific character yet also incorporate the accumulation of a performer’s reputation and the epitome of their unique technique.'
Find out more about the awards and the other winners here: http://tapra.org/awards/david-bradby/