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Theatre & Performance Studies News

In Memoriam - Professor Jim Davis

Prof Jim DavisIt is with a very heavy heart that we write to let you know that Professor Jim Davis passed away on Saturday 4th November following a stroke. Everyone who had the pleasure of encountering Jim will appreciate that this is a huge loss for his family, friends, colleagues, collaborators and the wider research community. He was a fantastic scholar and unwavering champion for the discipline and theatre historiography. He was such an important part of the Theatre and Performance family at the University of Warwick and will be missed for his leadership, mentorship, friendship and unfailing sense of fun and mischief.

Jim Davis joined Warwick in 2004 as Head of Department (2004-2009) after eighteen years teaching Theatre Studies at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where he was latterly Head of the School of Theatre, Film and Dance. In Australia he was also President of the Australasian Drama Studies Association and member of the Board of Studies of the National Institute of Dramatic Art. Prior to leaving for Australia he spent ten years teaching in London at what is now Roehampton University. He co-organised many conferences including for the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR) in New South Wales and at Warwick. He convened Historiography Working Groups for both IFTR and for TaPRA. He served as an editor for the journal Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film.

He published widely and with considerable critical acclaim in the area of nineteenth-century British theatre. His most recent bookComic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England (2015) won the TaPRA David Bradby Prize for Research in International Theatre and Performance in 2017 and was shortlisted for the 2015 TLA George Freedley Memorial Award. His other publications include Theatre & Entertainment (2016), Dickensian Dramas: Plays from Charles Dickens Volume II (2017) and European Theatre Performance Practice Vol 3 1750-1900 (editor, 2014). He was also joint author of a study of London theatre audiences in the nineteenth century Reflecting the Audience: London 1840-1880 (2001), which was awarded the 2001 Theatre Book Prize. He contributed numerous chapters including essays on nineteenth-century acting to the Cambridge History of British Theatre and on audiences to the Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre. He also published many articles in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Theatre Notebook, Essays in Theatre, Themes in Drama, New Theatre Quarterly, Nineteenth Century Theatre, Theatre Research International and The Dickensian. He was also responsible for many of the theatrical entries in The Oxford Readers' Companion to Dickens and contributed to the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Theatre and Performance, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Stage Actors and Acting and the New Dictionary of National Biography. For several years he wrote an annual review of publications on nineteenth-century English Drama and Theatre for The Year's Work in English Studies.

There will be an event to celebrate Jim’s life and work on 6 January 2024 12pm-4pm in the Studios in the Faculty of Arts Building on the University of Warwick's campus. Anyone is welcome (colleagues, friends, alumni etc). This will be a hybrid event, so if you cannot attend in person, but would like to join us online, that's also possible. Please RSVP to Dr David Coates - D.J.Coates@warwick.ac.uk

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3-year Sensing the City Research Project Wins Arts and Humanities Research Council Funding

Sensing the City: an Embodied Documentation and Mapping of the Changing Uses and Tempers of Urban Place (a practice-based case-study of Coventry)

Scheduled to take place over a period of three years this practice-based research project, which is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) at a total cost of £330,500, will undertake a series of site-specific studies of urban rhythms, atmospheres, textures, practices and patterns of behaviour in the West Midlands city of Coventry (UK). Led by Dr Nicolas Whybrow as Principal Investigator, with Dr Michael Pigott as one of the Co-Investigators, the project will make use of the sensate, performing human body as a data-gathering sensor in the first instance, applying techniques of writing or notation and technologies of sound/oral recording, photography, performance and film in the second instance to respond to, document and process such fieldwork activity. The third and final phase of the research programme will be to visualise and present documented text, sound and image material both as an online, interactive mapping of the urban sites in question (presented as a prototypical mixed media website) and via a 'smart' device. The project will also culminate in an exhibition, incorporating a one-day symposium, and a co-curated publication. Together these outputs will present the findings of the project in a form that is accessible to a broader public as well as to professional specialists in fields related to the design and planning of urban futures.

The project’s main researchers include practice-based academics in performance, film and digital technologies from the University of Warwick, in dance from Coventry University's Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), and a commissioned artist-researcher in immersive performance and site-specific installation with the professional London-based company sirenscrossing. Altogether there are four practice-based micro-projects, which will operate relatively independently in the first instance. Each has a slightly different disciplinary emphasis and methodological approach, but all will contribute to the main project outputs cited above, thus forming a rich, multi-faceted, integrated research portfolio relating to the city of Coventry. The project will also draw in, as consultant, a practice-based academic from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia who specialises in the implementation of body weather movement techniques in urban sites. As a whole Sensing the City will present conclusions about the constitution, character and morphology of urban space as public, habitable and sustainable space by monitoring the instinctive reactions of the body. In other words, as a symptom of the degree to which cities are changing in the 21st century, it will examine the effects on the practices and behaviours of urban dwellers of key features of the atmospheric, aesthetic force-field that is modern-day urban space.

Principal Investigator: Dr Nicolas Whybrow (Theatre and Performance Studies, Warwick)

Co-Investigators: Dr Michael Pigott (Film & TV Studies and Theatre & Performance Studies, Warwick), Dr Natalie Garrett Brown (Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University)

Researchers/Post-docs: Dr Emma Meehan (Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University), Nataliya Tkachencko (Warwick Institute for the Science of Cities and Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, Warwick)

Commissioned Artist: Carolyn Deby, sirenscrossing, London

International Consultant: Dr Stuart Grant (Monash University, Melbourne, Australia)

Additional project team members: Impact Officer (to be appointed), Academic Technologist (Steve Ranford), Technical Specialist (Rob Batterbee).

 coventry

Tue 21 Jun 2016, 13:51 | Tags: Research