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.
Collaborative Doctoral Award - 'Theatre and the Aristocracy: Passion, Patronage, Power and Politics, 1771-1893'
Dr David Coates has worked with Nicola Allen (Archivist at Woburn Abbey) to set up a Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) with the Bedford Estates. This means that they have secured a funded PhD position to start in October 2024. The project that they will co-supervise will interrogate the complex relationships between theatre and the aristocracy in the long nineteenth century. There is flexibility in the CDA's design, enabling the chosen candidate to find their own area of interest within this broad topic. They're now looking for prospective candidates to apply for the position, and David would be delighted to hear from anyone interested (D.J.Coates@warwick.ac.uk). Full details on the project can be found by clicking on this news story.
TOP STORY: Winners of WATE Award
Winners of WATE Award
The Arts Faculty Award recognises the achievements of Warwick's outstanding educators who have enabled excellent learning, creating the conditions within which all students are supported and empowered to succeed and thrive.
Winner - Ian Farnell (Theatre and Performance Studies, School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures)
Commended - Ronan Hatfull (Theatre and Performance Studies, School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures)
Winner - David Coates (Theatre and Performance Studies, School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures)
SCUDD Conference 2021 hosted by Warwick
SCUDD 2021: Beyond Inclusion
The annual SCUDD conference will take place online on Thursday 24th and Friday 25thJune 2021.
The aim of this conference is to bring together artists, academics, and students to think together about the politics of inclusion: its opportunities, challenges, and limits. The conference begins with a sense that institutional work on diversity and inclusion has tended to rearrange the deckchairs but leave the ship intact and on course for disaster. This conference seeks to identify and interrogate inequalities of access, safety, and opportunity across experiences of exclusion. The purpose here is to identify both the specificities of lived experiences of structural and systemic exclusion but also to look across exclusory practices and phenomena to build resistive solidarities. Moreover, the conference will debate what it might mean to shift the conversation away from inclusion, which retains a sense of the centre enveloping the margin, and instead think through the possibilities for our campuses and our industry to become sites of anti-exclusion.
The Standing Conference of University Drama Departments (SCUDD) represents the interests of Drama, Theatre and Performance in the Higher Education sector in the UK. SCUDD acts as a mediator with bodies such as funding councils, the AHRC and the Arts Councils and is consulted by such organisations when matters of future policy are discussed and decided. Its annual conference concerns topics, issues and debates relevant to those working in drama, theatre and performance in HE. This year’s conference will make space for reflections on working in our field during covid-19 and will continue discussions around advocacy for - and threats to - the discipline. As part of the conference, SCUDD’s AGM will take place. The conference will be free to attend.
Hosts: This year’s conference will be hosted online by the School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures at the University of Warwick. The conference organisers working in partnership with the SCUDD Exec are Dr Anna Harpin, Dr David Coates and Dr Tim White.
Programme and Registration: Details about how to register for the conference and a full programme of panels and events will be released closer to the conference.
Queries: If you have any questions or queries about the conference at this stage, please don’t hesitate to get in touch off list using D.J.Coates@warwick.ac.uk
David Coates has an article published: ‘Amateur Theatre Networks in the Archive’ Performance Research’s special issue ‘On Amateurs’
It is available through the library or https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/67DYCCYI6AXQ9DQWCUEY/full?target=10.1080/13528165.2020.1736751