Theatre & Performance Studies News

In Memoriam - Professor Jim Davis

Prof Jim Davis 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 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.

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Call for Papers: Cultures of Toxicity

In Todd Haynes’ 1995 film Safe, Carol (Julianne Moore) is plagued by ‘multiple chemical sensitivities’. The character experiences her environment as a series of toxic threats that cause accumulating and varied physical and psychical consequences. The film concludes with Carol holed up, alone, in an antiseptic pod in a therapeutic community in the desert. She will be safe here, as long as she remains insulated against the ever-increasing threats of the contemporary world. Thus, it is only through a radically diminished life of social and cultural isolation that Carol can survive and be ‘well’. Safe, then, raises a series of questions about the nature and value of toxicity, vulnerability, safety, and resilience that have become culturally central in the twenty-first century.

This conference aims to explore the concept of toxicity in relation to a number of contemporary political concerns including culture, health, economics, gender, and ecology. We are concerned to examine how cultural practices (from theatre to graphic fiction) and critical methodologies, for example in performance studies, are contributing to, and intervening in, contemporary anxieties about safety, risk and toxicity.

This conference brings together a number of distinct but interlocking ideas. There is a striking contemporary habit to identify phenomena as toxic – from masculinity to assets, from cultures to environments. In this way, ‘toxic’ no longer simply refers to specific physical substances but rather to practices, attitudes, structures and more. Such practices serve to constitute people as multiply helpless, liable to plural risks and dangers. Discourses in health and wellbeing movements, for example, frequently reinforce images of people as vulnerable and promote forms of individualised self-governance and vigilance that obscure real social and political processes. Related, in the global north, we are living through a period of renewed debates about freedom of speech, trigger warnings, and safe spaces on campuses and beyond, all of which tacitly frame art and ideas as potential threats. In this regard, contemporary individuality involves becoming a watchful and resilient guard of one’s sovereign bodily security against infinite and immaterial dangers. Toxicity is, then, both concrete and atmospheric.

What is at stake in such images, narratives, and metaphors of toxicity? How far does describing something like masculinity as ‘toxic’ efface questions of ethics, power, patriarchy and reinscribe womanhood (and other marginalised categories of identity) as inevitably vulnerable? To what degree does toxicity reproduce attitudes to identity and history that are both individualising and fatalistic? In what ways does the notion of ‘safety’ operate as a means to neutralise political complaint or resistance? Or might the language of toxicity be politically generative, insisting on the real-world effects of patterns of behaviour, structures of economic speculation and disparate practices of environmental depletion? Does toxicity expose faultlines in cultural norms, understandings, and values? Put simply, what does toxicity mean and what does it do? How is toxicity produced, sustained, and distributed? The conference thus seeks to examine what lies beneath labels of toxicity and interrogate the complex politics of threat, vulnerability, safety, and resistance.

We invite papers of 20 minutes that respond to notions of cultures of toxicity in relation to a wide range of areas including:

Arts, culture, and performance
Gender and sexuality
Health and wellbeing
Education and pedagogy
Environments and ecologies
Structures and systems
Government and policy
Critical organisation and expression
Economics and finance
Communities and cultures

The conference will take place at the University of Warwick on Friday 8^th and Saturday 9^th November 2019. We would like to receive abstracts of no more than 300 words with an accompanying biog of up to 150 words by 31^st March 2019. Please send your abstract and any questions to a.r.harpin@warwick.ac.uk and d.rebellato@rhul.ac.uk

Mon 26 Nov 2018, 10:00 | Tags: Conference Research Dr Anna Harpin Call for Papers