My research has ranged widely across the history of theatre and culture in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My 2003 monograph New Readings in Theatre History  offers a revisionist historiography arguing for a more organic, less judgemental and hierarchical understanding of the history of the British stage. It is a crystallisation of my interest in all the teeming life of the gas lit stage – I have written about melodrama on horseback and blackface minstrelsy as well as Henry Irving’s King Lear, dramatists from Jane Scott to Arthur Wing Pinero and music hall male impersonators like Vesta Tilley. In pursuit of new ways of reading the past of performance, I have drawn upon feminist and cultural materialist histories, and begun to collaborate with colleagues in practice-based research, where we are developing the revival of Romantic melodrama and burletta. My latest book, The Victorian Clown, looks at the roots of stand-up comedy in two unpublished manuscripts by Victorian comic men – a contortionist bottle-balancer and a circus clown. It is part of an AHRC-funded project which aims to set the understanding of nineteenth-century theatre on a broader basis. Two further books are part of this project. The next, by Dr Ann Featherstone, will map nineteenth and twentieth century travelling theatres across England and Wales, which brought entertainment to village greens and the back streets of mill and mining towns; the second is my next volume, which focusses on the mid-century foundations of  London’s West End.

I only teach at graduate level, and welcome new PhD students in any historical area connected with my own research fields.

July 2007