Stepping Off the Expert Pedestal: Theatrical Archaeology and the Importance of Co-production
Stepping Off the Expert Pedestal: Theatrical Archaeology and the Importance of Co-production
Kate Astbury is a professor of French Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick. Her research primarily focuses on the French 18th and early-19th centuries. More recently, her work has explored the history of Black Caribbean revolutionaries held as prisoners at Portchester Castle during the revolutionary period and has utilised co-production and community collaboration to address issues of social justice.
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Could you tell us about your research and some of the methodological approaches you use?
By training, I would consider myself to be a literary historian. That means I look at the context in which a work is both written and published because the politics, the society and the context in which a work is produced is going to have an impact on that literary work. I'll use the French Revolution as an example. I wrote a book called Narrative Responses to the Trauma of the French Revolution.Link opens in a new window One of the things about the Revolution is that somebody who would be seen as quite radical in 1789 can, by 1792, seem conservative because the Revolution has moved on faster than their own political views have evolved. Therefore, to be able to interpret some of the short stories and the novels published during the French Revolution, you need to understand both the point at which they're written and the point at which they’re published, because there might be a mismatch between those two things. Currently for a book I’m writing on theatre under Napoleon, I'm looking very closely at the context in which theatre productions are being staged, rather than necessarily looking at them just as printed texts. Performances are ephemeral. In most instances for this period we have very limited records of how a play was staged. We have snippets from the press; we might have receipts showing how many people watched a particular performance; we might know something about the actors who were playing certain roles. I’m trying to put everything back together again to understand why an audience might have interpreted a particular performance or production in a certain way.
Related Media
Katherine Astbury: Current Research Projects
Gathering and unravelling: Recording untold Histories-photoworks
Black Prisoners at Portchester Castle | English Heritage
Freedom and Revolution: creative responses to archival research (2023) by Katherine Astbury and Dominique Bouchard in Best Practice 11: A tool to improve museum education internationally ( Provides further detail on the Ancestors projects )
Why Collaborate:
Part one (Katherine Astbury and Jacque Roberts, discussing how they have been working togethor)