It is with a very heavy heart that we write to let you know that Professor Jim Davis passed away on Saturday 4^th November 2023 following a stroke. Everyone who had the pleasure of encountering Jim will appreciate that this is a huge loss for his family, friends, colleagues, collaborators and the wider research community. He was a fantastic scholar and unwavering champion for the discipline and theatre historiography. He was such an important part of the Theatre and Performance family at the University of Warwick and will be missed for his leadership, mentorship, friendship and unfailing sense of fun and mischief.

Jim Davis joined Warwick in 2004 as Head of Department (2004-2009) after eighteen years teaching Theatre Studies at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where he was latterly Head of the School of Theatre, Film and Dance. In Australia he was also President of the Australasian Drama Studies Association and member of the Board of Studies of the National Institute of Dramatic Art. Prior to leaving for Australia he spent ten years teaching in London at what is now Roehampton University. He co-organised many conferences including for the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR) in New South Wales and at Warwick. He convened Historiography Working Groups for both IFTR and for TaPRA. He served as an editor for the journal Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film.

He published widely and with considerable critical acclaim in the area of nineteenth-century British theatre. His most recent bookComic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England (2015) won the TaPRA David Bradby Prize for Research in International Theatre and Performance in 2017 and was shortlisted for the 2015 TLA George Freedley Memorial Award. His other publications include Theatre & Entertainment (2016), Dickensian Dramas: Plays from Charles Dickens Volume II (2017) and European Theatre Performance Practice Vol 3 1750-1900 (editor, 2014). He was also joint author of a study of London theatre audiences in the nineteenth century Reflecting the Audience: London 1840-1880 (2001), which was awarded the 2001 Theatre Book Prize. He contributed numerous chapters including essays on nineteenth-century acting to the Cambridge History of British Theatre and on audiences to the Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre. He also published many articles in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Theatre Notebook, Essays in Theatre, Themes in Drama, New Theatre Quarterly, Nineteenth Century Theatre, Theatre Research International and The Dickensian. He was also responsible for many of the theatrical entries in The Oxford Readers' Companion to Dickens and contributed to the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Theatre and Performance, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Stage Actors and Acting and the New Dictionary of National Biography. For several years he wrote an annual review of publications on nineteenth-century English Drama and Theatre for The Year's Work in English Studies.

An event to celebrate Jim’s life and work was held on 6 January 2024 12pm-4pm in the Studios in the Faculty of Arts Building on the University of Warwick's campus.

On behalf of our Friends Association, please find below details of their first fundraising event of 2022.

We are delighted that Professor Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick, has kindly agreed to give a talk (via Zoom)

'Scene Painters who became Artists, Artists who became Scene Designers: Artists and the Theatre in Nineteenth Century Britain'

Tuesday 26th April 2022

6.00pm BST. Finish approx 7.15pm including time for questions & discussion

Open to EVERYONE

Register for FREE Ticket and make DONATIONS via Eventbrite here:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/scene-painters-who-became-artists-artists-who-became-scene-designers-tickets-294700947467 

CFP - DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS 17 MAY 2021 

Modern Visuality and Nineteenth-Century Performance

Theatre and Visual Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century AHRC-Project

Conference at Exeter University, 31 August – 3 September 2021

This event is organised as part of the three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project, Theatre and Visual Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century, for which Prof Jim Davis (University of Warwick) is the Principal Investigator.

Keynote speakers:  

Michael Gamer, University of Pennsylvania

David Taylor, Oxford University

The nineteenth century is associated with the transformation of traditional ways of life, rapid technological advances, radical changes to the environment, and the emergence of new conceptions of subjectivity. Theatre was central to the culture of this period, so how far did it reflect or shape the experience of modernity? The Modernist experiments of the latter part of the century used to take centre stage in discussions about modernity, but how far can the popular, commercial theatrical culture of this period be seen as the locus of an emergent modern aesthetic?

This is the third and final conference of our project investigating nineteenth-century stage spectacle, the viewing practices associated with it, and its relationship to the wider visual culture of this period. With this event, we return to one of our core concerns: to consider nineteenth-century spectacle as a new and experimental form and as both a facet and product of modernity. We welcome ideas for papers on all aspects of the visual culture of theatre, from theatrical ephemera to links with the world of ‘high’ art, to new spectacular and immersive technologies. We particularly welcome submissions that bring questions of methodology to the fore, offering new contexts through which we may understand the theatrical spectacle of this period.

To read the full call for papers, submit an abstract, join our mailing list, and find out more about the project, please visit our website https://theatreandvisualculture19.wordpress.com. For queries, please contact Patricia Smyth, P.M.Smyth@Warwick.ac.uk.

Conference at the University of Warwick

_{Thursday 27 – Saturday 29 June 2019}

This research event will consider new ways of thinking about nineteenth-century stage spectacle, its meanings, its relationship to a wider visual culture, and its spectators. This period is associated with a widespread transformation of conceptions of vision and subjectivity, evidenced by an explosion of graphic imagery and new forms of visual experience such as panoramas and dioramas. Theatrical spectacle was at the centre of this emergent trans-medial, popular visual culture; yet there has been no major work to address this area since Martin Meisel’s seminal study, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England, of 1983. Organized as part of the three-year AHRC-funded collaborative project, ‘Theatre and Visual Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century’, this event aims to foster cross-disciplinary discussion of spectacle and spectatorship in this period.