Since the end of the prohibition of Chinese New Year celebrations, the night sky of towns and cities across Indonesia has been illuminated with fireworks on the eve of Chinese New Year. Most notably, the traditional street parades and accompanying festival on the fifteenth day of the New Year have been growing in size in a number of West…[Read more]

This interview with Rachel Mars was originally published by The Lark on 19 April 2017 as part of a blog salon, curated by Caridad Svich, called “Stages of Resistance.” The series reflected on themes related to political and aesthetic resistance in the making work for live performance. http://www.larktheatre.org/blog/our-carnal-hearts/

This book chapter analyses the experience of seeing two performances – La Fura dels Baus’s production of XXX and Ron Athey’s Solar Anus – during the first half of 2003, through the lenses of eroticism, death and visual theatricality.

This text was written and presented to introduce a screening of Sarah Polley’s 2012 film, ‘Stories We Tell’ on 22 February 2016 as part of the Peninsula Arts Women & Cinema season. It was published as a blog by The Arts Institute at the University of Plymouth on 25 February 2016:…[Read more]

A blog post on the performing body, presence and toxicity, reflecting on the deaths of Prince, Amy Winehouse, G.G. Allin and Whitney Houston. Published on the University of Plymouth’s Arts Institute blog, 6 May 2016: http://blogs.plymouth.ac.uk/artsinstitute/2016/05/06/feature-performing-the-toxic-body/

A blog post for the University of Plymouth’s Arts Institute on the French circus company, Archaos (published 9 July 2016): http://blogs.plymouth.ac.uk/artsinstitute/2016/07/09/feature-remembering-archaos-circus-with-attitude/

This is the final manuscript version of a chapter about Lynn Hershman’s Roberta Breitmore project, published in Susan Broadhurst & Josephine Machon (eds.), Identity, Performance and Technology: Practices of Empowerment, Embodiment and Technicity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 126-141.

This essay explores the first appearance of actresses on the public stage in England and the Dutch Republic. It considers the cultural climate, the theaters, and the plays selected for these early performances, particularly from the perspective of public femininity. In both countries antitheatricalists denounced female acting as a form of…[Read more]

Part of a much larger project, this part of the book developed, for the fist time, a history of intellectual engagement with Greek tragedy and tragic theology in general and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in particular as one of the central intellectual contests in the 18th century Europe, from the early stages of the Quérelle des Anciens et des Modernes…[Read more]

This article investigates the tensions inherent within the ‘anti-modern’ element of early modernism and its relationship to Victorian and fin de siècle narratives of modernity. Using Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913), this essay examines how the primitive is represented in E.M. Forster’s short story ‘The Machine Stops’ (1909) and Stravinsky/N…[Read more]

Preliminary analysis of the representation of laborers in Greek tragedy and satyr drama.

Discussion of class structure in fifth-century Athens, historical constitution of theater audiences, and the changes in the comic representation of class antagonism from Aristophanes to Menander.

Discussion of the relationship between historical conditions and aesthetic form in Euripidean tragedy.

Why do we play games—with and upon each other as well as ourselves? When are winners also losers, and vice-versa? How and to what end do we stretch the spaces of play? What happens when players go ‘out of bounds,’ or when games go ‘too far’? Moreover, what happens when we push the parameters of inquiry: when we play with traditional narrative…[Read more]

Reflections on the significance of the sudden announcement, in autumn 2016, of the imminent departure of Emma Rice as Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe. Contemporary Theatre Review 27.1, Backpages.

Review of Medici Women: Portraits of Power, Love, and Betrayal by Gabrielle Langdon

Chapter in Witwenschaft in der frühen Neuzeit: fürstliche und adlige Witwen zwischen Fremd- und Selbstbestimmung

Chapter 8 in The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation

Ch 5 of Grief and Gender, 700-1700

Chapter 10 in Growing Old in Early Modern Europe: Cultural Representations