CRGR - Current Postgraduates

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CRGR - Current Postgraduates

Several PhD students are currently working on aspects of Reception across departments at Royal Holloway, on topics from the Odyssey in cinema to Enlightenment encyclopaedias. We welcome approaches from people of any background interested in pursuing research.

Katie Billotte
(k.billotte@rhul.ac.uk)

Katie attended the University of California, Berkeley where she received a B.A. in Classical Languages in 2005. Katie joined the CRGR in January 2009 as holder of the first CRGR Postgraduate Studentship and a full-time PhD researcher. Her research focuses on the reception of Greek and Roman tragedy in contemporary Latin America and the ways in which ancient myth is adapted to allow theatrical productions to explore questions of identity particularly ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Along these lines, alternative theatre plays an important role in her work and she is continually surprised how often ancient, canonical stories are used to challenge the status quo. She is also interested in broader questions concerning the potential for tragedy in the postmodern context in general and the postcolonial context in particular.

Miryana Dimitrova
(miryana.dimitrova@gmail.com)

A part-time student from Sofia, Bulgaria, Miryana is studying in the Drama Department under Edith Hall. Miryana's research focuses on the figure of Julius Caesar in the context of notions of theatricality, epic and time. Her work sees Caesar as a (historical) character who embodies a certain 'epic emotion', conceptually rooted in classical epic. Expressed by the desire to transcend temporality, this emotion defines Caesar's character in the context of the highly dynamic relationship between epic and drama. Thus a study on an epic character, such as Caesar, also aims to offer a fresh look at the function of time in drama. The thesis discusses Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), The tragedy of Caesar and Pompey (George Chapman), Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Handel) and Caesar and Cleopatra (Bernard Shaw), as well as Lucan's epic poem Civil War, Plutarch's life of Caesar and Julius Caesar's own persona and writings. The thesis aims to show all works as interrelated in an intergeneric dialogue, which recognizes that the colossal presence of Julius Caesar in the European cultural tradition does not allow to be framed within a genre.

Helen Eastman
(helen.eastman@rhul.ac.uk)

Helen arrived at RHUL in 2010 as the holder of our AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award held jointly with Northern Broadsides Theatre Company, and her research investigates its several productions of ancient plays and plays incorporating ancient material. She trained as a director at LAMDA after graduating from Oxford where she was the Passmore Edwards Scholar in Classics and English. Helen is Visiting Lecturer in Contemporary Performance Practice at Westminster University, Artistic Director of Live Canon and Senior Reader at Soho Theatre. As a freelance director of theatre, opera (and occasionally circus), Helen has worked throughout the UK at venues including Trafalgar Studios, Hackney Empire, Belfast Opera House, Glasgow Citizens Theatre, Queens Theatre, BAC, The National Theatre Studio, The De La Warr Pavillion and Bath Theatre Royal.

Rachel Kneebone
(rachelkneebone@yahoo.co.uk)

After completing her BA at Durham, Rachel took her MA in Classics at Royal Holloway in 2009, writing her dissertation on the German and French reception of Sophocles' Antigone. Studying under Edith Hall, her AHRC-funded full-time PhD investigates the uses of Greek Tragedy in the modern novel, investigating in particular how post-war European fiction uses and subverts the ancient plays in order to investigate the postmodern challenge to the possibility of historical knowledge.

Jarrid Looney
(j.k.looney@rhul.ac.uk)

Jarrid comes from Virginia. He graduated from Berea College, Kentucky in 2008 with a degree in Theatre Studies (emphases in Directing and Dramaturgy) and Classical Civilizations; in 2006, he participated in an exchange programme with the Institute for International Studies in Greece. Jarrid's research investigates the performance history of Euripides' Hippolytus, with special emphasis on the historical shifts in focus with reference to ethics, psychology and characterisation.

Charlie MacDougall
(charles.a.macdougall@gmail.com)

Charlie is an AHRC-funded doctoral student supervised in the Classics Department by Edith Hall. He is researching the large and varied role played by the Odyssey in musical theatre, from the Venetian opera of Monteverdi in Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria through the many operas centred on Telemachus in the 18th century to Bruch's high Romantic oratorio on the epic theme to Modernist France and Broadway musicals. He argues that the nature of the epic as an orally generated text is one factor in its constant attractiveness to composers and directors of live musical theatre. Charlie recently spoke at an international conference Performing Homer, held in the Music Department at the University of Pinceton January 10th-12th 2009.

Lottie Parkyn
(lottieparkyn@aol.com)

Lottie took her MA in Greek Theatre Performance in the Drama Department at Royal Holloway, before moving into Classics for her PhD, which she started part-time in January 2009. Lottie is interested in the representation of physical violence through both verbal and visual means in the production of ancient Greek and Senecan tragedy. She is currently investigating the motif of violence in modern plays inspired by, or reconstructing, fragmentary ancient plays, including Tony Harrison's The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus and Timberlane Wertenbaker's The Love of the Nightingale.

Peggy Shannon
(pshannon@ucdavis.edu)

Peggy is Artistic Director of the Sacramento Theatre Company in California. She is working part-time on her PhD in the Drama Department under Edith Hall. Her topic is the wave of productions of Greek drama about war by female directors over the last two decades. Peggy asks why women have been so attracted to plays such as Euripides' Trojan Women and Aeschylus' Persians, and incorporates in her work a wide variety of material relating to recent productions, including her own first-hand experience and interviews with other directors and female classical scholars.

Matt Shipton
(matthewshipton1@googlemail.com)

Matt comes to the Classics Department having completed his MA thesis on honour in Euripides' Bacchae, an exercise that encouraged reflection on concepts such as revenge and respect in Greek tragedy, particularly in relation to crowds or gangs, and how these issues are treated in the present day. Using key texts such as Sophocles' Ajax, Matt is investigating presentations of masses, collectives and groups in tragedy using recent sociological studies of gangs and crowd behaviour. At the same time Matt asks how contemporary stagings of tragedy express the immense current media interest in gang culture. Matt is currently studying part-time under Edith Hall.

Magdalena Zira
(magdalenazira@gmail.com)

Magdalena is a theatre director based in Cyprus. She has a Classics as well as Drama background and is working on her PhD part-time, supervised by Edith Hall. Her area of study is the use of the chorus in productions of Greek tragedy from 1980s onwards. A theatre practitioner herself, she is interested in the problems faced by contemporary directors in the West when dealing with the chorus. The elements of communal identity, music and dance seem to be the main hurdles in the successful incorporation of a Greek chorus in contemporary mise-en-scene. Negotiating these fundamental characteristics of the chorus on the contemporary stage raises issues that are aesthetic, social and even economic. She will look at solutions given by productions in recent decades as well as the influence of Eastern theatre traditions.