About the Project
The project will be run by Andy Kesson (he/ him, English and Creative Writing, University of Roehampton) and Sandra Nelson (they/ them, Media, Arts and Humanities, University of Sussex). We’re delighted that this announcement coincides with the relaunch of the Before Shakespeare website, which will continue to host updates from the project. You can find out more about some of the work leading up to this award on our dedicated Galatea pages on this new site.
Diverse Alarums will use a unique combination of methods to bring together and contribute to early modern studies, practice-as-research, audience studies, qualitative research, trans, queer, disability and critical race studies. It stages an extraordinarily important but largely forgotten early modern English play, John Lyly’s Galatea, thereby offering contemporary performers and audiences an unparalleled affirmative and intersectional demographic, exploring queer, transgender, disabled and migrant lives in a cast of characters that includes very few cisgender adult males and a plot that builds towards the celebration of a queer and trans marriage. The play has almost no stage history since 1588, and is only starting to be better known amongst academics and students, largely because of the work and work-in-progress of members of this project.
The project will stage a high-profile, two-week production of the play in collaboration with the director Emma Frankland, Marlborough Productions and WildWorks, bringing together early modern and contemporary research with our practitioners’ creative work. It will work with our performers and audiences to investigate how the contemporary performance of early modern plays might become opportunities for vital community-building, and work with an additional group of artists to co-create work that responds to the production. The project will result in a number of international conference presentations, publications and a seminar series, and the Postdoctoral Research Fellow will be able to contribute to all of these outputs. These include an edition of the play that provides John Lyly’s text, the production’s spoken script and the production’s British Sign Language script.
Job Opportunity
The project is now accepting applications for a 30-month postdoctoral position. To find out more and apply, see the job page on Roehampton’s website.
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