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.
Modern Visuality and Nineteenth-Century Performance: Conference Call for Papers
CFP - DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS 17 MAY 2021
Modern Visuality and Nineteenth-Century Performance
Theatre and Visual Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century AHRC-Project
Conference at Exeter University, 31 August – 3 September 2021
This event is organised as part of the three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project, Theatre and Visual Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century, for which Prof Jim Davis (University of Warwick) is the Principal Investigator.
Keynote speakers:
Michael Gamer, University of Pennsylvania
David Taylor, Oxford University
The nineteenth century is associated with the transformation of traditional ways of life, rapid technological advances, radical changes to the environment, and the emergence of new conceptions of subjectivity. Theatre was central to the culture of this period, so how far did it reflect or shape the experience of modernity? The Modernist experiments of the latter part of the century used to take centre stage in discussions about modernity, but how far can the popular, commercial theatrical culture of this period be seen as the locus of an emergent modern aesthetic?
This is the third and final conference of our project investigating nineteenth-century stage spectacle, the viewing practices associated with it, and its relationship to the wider visual culture of this period. With this event, we return to one of our core concerns: to consider nineteenth-century spectacle as a new and experimental form and as both a facet and product of modernity. We welcome ideas for papers on all aspects of the visual culture of theatre, from theatrical ephemera to links with the world of ‘high’ art, to new spectacular and immersive technologies. We particularly welcome submissions that bring questions of methodology to the fore, offering new contexts through which we may understand the theatrical spectacle of this period.
To read the full call for papers, submit an abstract, join our mailing list, and find out more about the project, please visit our website https://theatreandvisualculture19.wordpress.com. For queries, please contact Patricia Smyth, P.M.Smyth@Warwick.ac.uk.
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
Social Movements, Performance and Democratic Practices (Indo-Canadian Dialogue): A Conference
Shastri-Indo Canadian Institute Golden Jubilee Online Conference
Social Movements, Performance and Democratic Practices (Indo-Canadian Dialogue)
Collaboration between: School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Department of Theatre, University of Ottawa, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Warwick
The last decade has seen the rise of a range of social and political movements across the globe that have challenged the existing boundaries and imaginations of political and legal articulation of rights and justice, and notions of development. At the heart of these developments has been the interlinked phenomenon of populism and performative paradigm of politics that is based on a complex relationship between digital presence and bodies physically assembling in space. Taking forward the earlier collaborative projects between the universities, namely, the Gendered Citizenship: Manifestations and Performance and Cultures of the Left: Manifestations and Performance, the present conference foregrounds theatrical/performance exchanges and the need for cross-cultural dialogue and theorisation in re-examining populism. Opening up a dialogue on the under-explored Indian-Canadian experience, the conference seeks to explore the challenges to the practices of democracy and the potential of performance to offer alternative ways of reorganisation of the world.
The performance studies framework of the conference provides an interdisciplinary exploration of cross-cultural patterns of performance and the performative nature of political dissent, bringing together seemingly diverging experiential realms. It brings together the popular cultural performances and the practices of assembling and choreographing of bodies in the streets as well as in digital space. It also offers a lens to understand what might not otherwise be deemed as public displays, whether it be dissent and protests or ways of care of self and others as vulnerable bodies or not deemed to be able-bodied to articulate politics by the mainstream. The contemporary context of Covid19 pandemic has further brought into relief the specific challenges to understand the performative paradigm of politics. The conference takes the intense moment of pandemic looking both synchronically and diachronically into the practices of democracy, and what past experiences might have to offer to the languages and gestures of democratic practices in the contemporary. In doing so, the conference will foreground an aesthetic of resistance not only as a reactive practice, but as a way to sustain articulation of rights and the politics of inclusion, equality, care for the commons and social justice.
Click the link above to see the event's schedule.
RSVP for link: parameswaranameet@gmail.com
Three Minute Thesis (3MT)
Can you present your thesis in just 3 Minutes? Are you up for the challenge? You have three minutes, one static slide, no props, and no materials – just you! If you get through the first round we will train and support you so that you are ready for a live Warwick final. The winner of this will get put forward to the regional finals – and who knows maybe the National Final.