Helen Dallas
I was awarded my DPhil in June 2024 and am now a post-award member of the English Faculty, also working as Archives Assistant in Trinity College. My research focuses on Romantic theatre, with broader interests in (very) long eighteenth-century literature and culture, performance across a wide historical period, and questions of genre.
Thesis Title: The Life and Death of Dramatic Character in the Romantic Period, 1779-1839
Supervisor: Professor David F. Taylor
My thesis argues that a new model of dramatic character emerged in the late eighteenth century, when audiences were confronted for the first time with the possibility that a character could 'die' with a beloved actor. I examine how Romantic culture anticipated and attempted to combat such loss across textual, visual, and material forms, and the transformative effect this had: the Romantic period, I contend, marked a shift in the relationship between theatre and memory. My work encompasses major canonical Romantic writers, including prominently Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, William Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb, alongside non-canonical writers, particularly women, such as Elizabeth Inchbald, Joanna Baillie, and Marie Thérèse De Camp.
Publications
'Theatre, Anti-Theatricality and Anti-Blackness in Romantic Criticism', Romanticism, 30.3 (2024), 261-71 https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2024.0658
Forthcoming: 'The Haunted Closet: Romantic Drama and the Absent Body', Studies in Romanticism, 64.4 (2025)
Forthcoming: 'Eighteenth-Century Drama', The Year’s Work in English Studies, 104 (2025)
Reviews
James Harriman-Smith, What Would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons From the Eighteenth Century (London: Methuen Drama, 2024), Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12972
Forthcoming: Jennifer Buckley and Montana Davies-Shuck (eds), Character and Caricature, 1660–1820 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), Restoration: Studies in Literature and Culture 1660-1700
Teaching
I have experience teaching Shakespeare, English Literature 1660-1760, English Literature 1760-1830 (including as a stipendiary lecturer), supervising undergraduate dissertations, and devising courses for visiting students based around student interest, including creative writing and European theatre 1800-present. I was an Ashmolean Junior Teaching Fellow 2022-23.
More about me
I was part of a working group for the staging of a rehearsed reading of Joanna Baillie's The Tryal (1799) at Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds. I played Agnes in the performance, which can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3ksanlDElU I have previously assisted with projects in collaboration with Prof David F. Taylor and Creation theatre to stage rehearsed readings of eighteenth-century plays by women.
I was TORCH Performance Research Hub Co-Ordinator from 2024-25. I was one of the convenors of the the TORCH Reimagining Performance Network, and co-created and presented Practice Makes... the Oxford Reimagining Performance Podcast.
I am a regular theatre reviewer for the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies's Criticks blog.
As well as theatre, I love novels, and wrote a piece on Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone for Ten-Minute Book Club: The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins | Faculty of English
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'm also an early-career playwright, and my work features as part of the Prototype new writing series in Oxford. I dabble in other literary forms too, and in 2024 I was awarded the Richard Hillary Prize for creative writing.
