Theatre & Performance Studies News
In Memoriam - Professor Jim Davis
It 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.
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.
Sensing the City research team launch new exhibition
Coventry and Warwickshire residents are getting a second chance to see and experience artworks created as part of the Sensing the City project, previously shown in The Herbert in 2020.
Urban Sensographies: an Urban Room comes to city-centre venue Metropolis between Friday 22 and Saturday 30 July, presenting highlights of the 2020 exhibition and new work developed subsequently, in light of the coronavirus pandemic and Coventry’s year as UK City of Culture.
The three-year Sensing the City project drew on arts and humanities skills and practices to explore Coventry city centre, using the human senses to gather data about life in the city and to map how its urban spaces are used and experienced.
The exhibition will include photographic collages, texts, and interactive materials; video and sound work; and performance ‘actions’ by sirenscrossing. Visitors to the Urban Room on Sunday 24 July may take part in a guided artists’ sensory walk around the city centre (at 2pm), introducing some of the research techniques used and visiting some of the most interesting spots explored during the project.
Dr Michael Pigott of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick said: “Our collaborative research group came together to ask two key questions: who and what is Coventry city centre for? And how might we use the human body as a data-gathering sensor to investigate the rhythms and atmospheres of urban space?”
“Following the radical re-evaluation of city spaces caused by the pandemic and the accelerating climate crisis, we are returning with renewed urgency to the central question of what we want our cities to be and do for us, and how we can make this happen.”
Members of the Sensing the City research collective include Professor Nicolas Whybrow and Dr Michael Pigott (University of Warwick), Coventry University's Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), the dance company enter&inhabit, and the London-based artist-researcher Dr Carolyn Deby/sirenscrossing.
In addition to the creative outputs, findings from the project are being shared with urban planners and other professional specialists in fields related to the design and planning of urban futures. Professor Whybrow and Carolyn Deby/sirenscrossing were both invited to contribute essays to the Local Government Association’s “The Future of Cities” debate. [LINK:https://www.local.gov.uk/future-cities]
NOTES TO EDITORS
Download images from the exhibition:
https://warwick.ac.uk/services/communications/medialibrary/images/july_2022/peeling-paint-still-super35_1.1.2.jpg (credit: Michael Lightborne)
https://warwick.ac.uk/services/communications/medialibrary/images/july_2022/ringroadring-wallpanelimage-rgb.jpg (credit: Michael Lightborne)
https://warwick.ac.uk/services/communications/medialibrary/images/july_2022/sensingthecityleadimage.jpg (credit: Nicolas Whybrow)
Urban Sensographies: an Urban Room. Upstairs in Metropolis, Earl Street, Coventry CV1 5RU. Friday 22 to Saturday 30 July, 12-8pm.
The exhibition is free to visit.
Guided walk around the city centre: 2pm - 3.30pm, Sunday 24 July
The exhibition is supported by: University of Warwick, Coventry University, University of East London, AHRC/UKRI, Metropolis and Historic Coventry. More information can be found here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/scapvc/film/research/urban_sensographies/
Sensing the City: an Embodied Documentation and Mapping of the Changing Uses and Tempers of Urban Place (a practice-based case-study of Coventry) was funded by the AHRC and ran 2017-2020. More information on the project can be found here:https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/scapvc/theatre/research/impact/sensing
Photos from the enter&inhabit strand of the research can be seen here:https://www.enterinhabit.com/sensingthecity/exhibition/sensingthecity_exhibition_photos.html
Film and sound work from Michael Pigott’s strand of the project, including an album of sounds of the Ring Road, can be viewed here: https://www.michaellightborne.com/urbansensographies
The title of the exhibition was inspired by the new Routledge book Urban Sensographies that draws together the findings of Sensing the City, published by Routledge and available in paperback from August:
Whybrow, Nicolas (ed) (2021) Urban Sensographies (London and New York: Routledge).
The Sensing the City Project Team:
- Professor Nicolas Whybrow, University of Warwick
- Dr Natalie Garrett Brown, University of East London
- Dr Emma Meehan, Coventry University
- Dr Michael Pigott, University of Warwick
- Dr Carolyn Deby, sirenscrossing
- Dr Nese Ceren Tosun, University of Warwick
- Rob Batterbee, University of Warwick