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Dr Gerry Cousin

Emeritus Reader

Geraldine Cousin taught at the University of Warwick from 1977 until around 2009. She studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she won the Ronson Award. Later she gained a First Class Honours Degree in English and Drama at Exeter University. She wrote her doctoral thesis on the relationship between the actor and stage objects in the work of Stanislavsky and Brecht. Her research in recent years has focused primarily on the work of twentieth-century British women playwrights and practitioners, and contemporary Shakespearean performance.

Dr Cousin is the author of Churchill the Playwright (Methuen, 1989), King John (Shakespeare in Performance) (Manchester University Press, 1994), and Women in Dramatic Place and Time: Contemporary Female Characters on Stage (Routledge, 1996). She has recently completed a book entitled Recording Women (for Harwood Academic Publishers) which documents the work of three women-run theatre companies: Sphinx Theatre Company, Scarlet Theatre and Foursight Theatre.

Additionally, she has published articles on a wide range of aspects of twentieth-century performance: Stanislavsky and Brecht; Stanislavsky and Pirandello; Shakespearean performance; a comparison of Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Break of Day and Scarlet Theatre's all-female adaptation of Chekov's Three Sisters; and interviews with practitioners: Caryl Churchill, Deborah Warner, Mike Pearson (of the Welsh-based, site-specific theatre company Brith Gof), and members of Footsbarn Travelling Theatre Company.