*** This email has been sent from the MEDIA ARTS AND DANCE email forum. To respond to all subscribers email [log in to unmask] ***
invitation::
– please join us for our next Research Seminar at Brunel -
Wednesday November 29: 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Drama Studio, Gaskell Building 048, Brunel University, Cleveland Rd. London UB8 3PH
Holly Maples : “Acting Out in Public: Display, Decency and 19th Century American Female Spectatorship”
"Acting Out in Public" comes from Holly Maples’ current book project, The Erotic Spectator, examining female spectatorship in 19th and early 20th century America. Much of the struggle against “indecent entertainment” focused on the moral degradation of American women of the “middling sorts.” How women negotiated their position in society as symbols of American virtue and integrity, while also using it to push the boundaries of their place in the public sphere through the politics of “pernicious pleasure” is at the heart of this project. This project intersects archival research with theories of embodied spectatorship and sensorial history.
Bio
Holly Maples is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre at Brunel University London. Both a theatre practitioner and a scholar, she has directed productions in the United States, Ireland and the United Kingdom. She formerly taught at University of East Anglia, Trinity College Dublin and the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Maples research addresses how popular entertainment, heritage performance, and commemorative festivals reflect and shape societal change. Her book, Culture War: Conflict, Commemoration and the Contemporary Abbey Theatre, was published in the Reimagining Ireland series in 2011 (Peter Lang). She is particularly interested in investigating "performative publics," examining the public's manifestations of national, embodied, and collective identity through popular entertainment such as parades, national festivals, social dance, theatre spectatorship and heritage performance.
++
Research Seminar Theme: Precarity and the Politics of Art: Performative and Critical Empowerment after Democracy
Performance Research Seminar Coordinator: Johannes Birringer
Contact: +44 (0)1895 267 343
Check our whole series at: http://people.brunel.ac.uk/dap/ResearchSeminarSeries.html
+++++++++
