Josh Douglas

Thesis Title: Urban Encounters: The Theatrical Geographies of Eighteenth Century Comedy, 1760-1810

Supervisor: David Taylor
 

Research Interests:

Theatre of the long-eighteenth century; performance studies; spatial theory; visual and material culture; architectural history; collections; time and temporality; speed; memory; advertising and print networks.
 

Doctoral Research: 

My research, broadly conceived, concerns the relationship between aesthetic forms and urban modernity. Specifically, I examine how popular entertainment in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries participated in the production and mediation of spatial knowledge. My work diverges from the critical tendency to reconstruct eighteenth-century London as an assemblage of exemplary locations—the coffeehouse, the tavern, the Royal Exchange—and instead reconsiders the metropolis as a constellation of visual regimes, embodied movements, print networks and built environments. Whilst chiefly concerned with the dramatic writings of Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah Cowley, Thomas Holcroft and John O’Keeffe, my project mobilises performance as a cultural technology that extends beyond the walls of the theatre, addressing the antique collection, the printed advertisement, the high-speed horse race, and the funeral procession. By emphasising the different spatial epistemologies through which everyday urban life was imaginatively encountered my project develops new interdisciplinary connections between literary criticism, performance studies and cultural geography. This research is generously funded by an Oxford-Thatcher Graduate Scholarship.

Education:

English Literature, B.A. (Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge)

English Studies, MPhil (Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge)