Indiana University

Faculty Member, English

About

I work and write in two overlapping fields: early modern English drama and public culture (including sermons, royal entries, ballads, mayoral pageants, beast baitings, polemics, satires and feuds) and Western theatre and performance, from the Greeks to the present. My approach to the Shakespearean stage is driven by the epistemological problems that the theatre poses to a culture eager to draw a clear line between artifice and authenticity. I tend to focus on phenomena that don't sit easily within the counterfeit world of a play, such as onstage animals, gunfire, nudity, stuttering, and pyrotechnics. In my first book, Persecution, Plague and Fire, I argue that the disasters let loose from the realm of theatrical action (most famously the fire that consumed the Globe in 1613) are illustrations of an early modern philosophy of the stage that anticipates a key tenet of performance studies: that performance "becomes itself through disappearance" (Peggy Phelan, Unmarked). Rather more daunting is the correlative proposition, well evidenced in the perplexed discourse of 16th century theatre history, that performance disappears the epochs in which it triumphs.

My second book turns treats the flip side of this apocalypticism. In The Implausible History of the Sea Spectacle, from Nero to Wagner, I take on the persistence of a theatrical form that is, evidentially speaking, highly suspect. My object is to answer two questions: what can criticism say about an irrational entertainment, and what can history do with an event whose occurrence is impossible to ascertain? By bringing together such disparate and questionable occasions as the amphitheatrical naumachiae described by Martial, the water pageants presented for Elizabeth I, Henry II, Catherine of Medici and Samuel de Champlain, Enlightenment electric eel demonstrations and the descent of William Beebe into the Atlantic deep, I hope to make the case for performance as a mode of experience whose ephemerality is counterbalanced by the hold it maintains on the popular mentalité.

While questioning the importance of actuality in theatre history, I have been drawn to the Digital Humanities and to the virtual as a paradigm for a new historiography that privileges the power of feeling over the matter of fact.

My teaching intervenes in these questions, as well as in the following disciplinary discourses: historiography, phenomenology, affect studies, gender studies, social and theological history, Commonwealth studies (I am a Canadian American), and the philosophy of aesthetics.