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In Memoriam - Professor Jim Davis

Prof Jim DavisIt is with a very heavy heart that we write to let you know that Professor Jim Davis passed away on Saturday 4th November 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.

There will be an event to celebrate Jim’s life and work on 6 January 2024 12pm-4pm in the Studios in the Faculty of Arts Building on the University of Warwick's campus. Anyone is welcome (colleagues, friends, alumni etc). This will be a hybrid event, so if you cannot attend in person, but would like to join us online, that's also possible. Please RSVP to Dr David Coates - D.J.Coates@warwick.ac.uk

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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.

The project will focus on the relationship of popular forms of theatre to visual culture and on spectacle and spectatorship in nineteenth century Britain, with France used as a comparative case study. The study of theatrical spectacle in this period has been neglected, despite revisionist studies such as Meisel’s Realizations (1983) which examines the practice of ‘realizing’ works of art on stage. The project will use archival research and recent theoretical approaches to move beyond Meisel’s model to offer a new reading of nineteenth-century staging that considers it not just aspiring to the condition of visual art, but as part of wider popular visual culture. A key aim will be to interrogate the continuing association between spectacle and ‘passive viewing’ by demonstrating the capacity of stage spectacle to convey multiple meanings and by exploring audience participation in the active construction of those meanings. Thus, the project will examine theatrical spectacle as part of a commercial, technologically innovative explosion of imagery in this period, part of a visual culture that included new forms such as lithography, steel-engraving, optical entertainments (such as panoramas and dioramas) and the illustrated press. The circulation of images will be examined in relation to theories of ‘remediation’. While existing studies of inter-art connections work on the premise of exchanges between essentially discrete art forms, this project will test the notion of a new kind of popular audience for whom distinctions of media were irrelevant and who sought instead the sensation of ‘immediacy’.

Sat 01 Sep 2018, 09:00 | Tags: Research Prof. Jim Davis Visual Culture Funding