“The Scholarly Subject of Performance”

Université de Montréal – room C-8111 (3150 rue Jean Brillant; Metro Université de Montréal)

Abstract:

Performance and scholarship have an intimate if sometimes conflictfilled relationship. Enacting the role of scholar can involve subtle—and not-so-subtle—erasures of the performer’s history, cultural situation, and style. And, at the same time, our writing of theatre and drama history benefits from working closely with theatre artists who enact complex interpretive performances unfamiliar to many academics and their institutions. However, digital media that now make video and audio central to our students’ ways of knowing, push us to reexamine how performance might function differently than it has in our classrooms, our digital representations of drama, and our selfrepresentations as scholars. Drawing upon his own history as performer and scholar, Thomas C. Crochunis will examine the background to the current hypermediated moment in theatre history studies.

Thomas C. Crochunis is Assistant Professor of English specializing in secondary English education and drama at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. He has published work on gothic drama, theatre history, women playwrights, and technology-based humanities scholarship in Romanticism on the Net, Gothic Studies, European Romantic Review, Victorian Studies, and various edited volumes. He is coeditor (with Michael Eberle-Sinatra) of the British Women Playwrights around 1800 Web project and the forthcoming Broadview Anthology of British Women Playwrights, 1777-1843, and has helped to organize a number of the Romantic era drama and theatre history pre-conference workshops that have been held in conjunction with the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism annual conference. He edited the collection Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays for Routledge (2004).

This presentation is part of the Second Workshop of the “Technologies, Media, and Representations in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France” Research Group.

Organized by Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Monique Morgan, and Jason Camlot, who acknowledge the generous support of their respective departments and faculties, and the Centre de recherche sur l’intermédialité.