Thesis Title: Making Dramatic Character: Theatre, Actors, and Publics in the Romantic Period
Supervisor: Dr David F. Taylor
Doctoral research
My project offers a theatrical counter-history of character, arguing against the narrative that drama failed to compete with the novel as a site of developed characterisation. On the contrary, I argue that there was a sophisticated model of dramatic character in the Romantic period which emerged through collaborative construction between text, performance, audience, and visual and material representations. I am interested in how a very particular kind of fixation on character - one which incorporated essays, consumer products, and widely circulated visual materials - emerged in the late eighteenth century and continued into the nineteenth.
Other work
I am a co-convenor of the TORCH Reimagining Performance Network, and co-presenter of Practice Makes... the Oxford Reimagining Performance Podcast.
I have reviewed theatre for the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies's Criticks Blog, e.g
Before coming to Oxford, I did my undergraduate degree in English at Christ's College, University of Cambridge, and my MA in Text and Performance at Birkbeck, University of London and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I remain interested in making theatre as well as researching it.
I am an Ashmolean Junior Teaching Fellow 2022-23, and also have experience teaching literature of the long eighteenth-century as well as drama up to the present.