Three CEMS HDR members graduated with their PhDs in February graduation ceremonies. Congratulations Dr Lucy Boon, Dr Barbara Taylor and Dr Julia Rodwell! Read their dissertation abstracts below.
Lucy Boon: Practising “Love & Faith” When Queering the Early Modern Canon
This project utilises a practice-as-research (PaR) methodology to examine adaptation processes throughout the rehearsal and performance of a new queer adaptation, titled Love & Faith (and something unholy). Love & Faith debuted at Qtopia, an LGBTIQ museum and performance space on Oxford Street in the heart of Darlinghurst, Sydney, in August 2024. Developed by an entirely LGBTIQ team, the production explored the central plots of Galatea by John Lyly and Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare. By placing the two texts into dialogue in a single production, Love & Faith established a queer temporality in performance, one that broke down spatial and temporal boundaries, locating resonances between the play-worlds, and between the texts and our own experiences as queer people living in Australia in 2024.
Utilising my own reflections as the production’s adapter and director, in addition to cast reflections, this project offers the unique perspectives of theatre makers to consider how the adaptation of early modern drama can provide queer artists with the opportunity to locate alternative temporalities that have a reparative function. It thus reframes adaptation from a mode of revision to a mode of repair, and considers how queer, creative embodiment can offer new insights into early modern plays. In doing so, it demonstrates not only how the adaptation of early modern drama can queer time – enabling LGBTIQ+ artists to access and imagine alternative pasts, presents and futures – but also identifies moments where this potential was realised in rehearsal and performance.
Barbara Taylor: Materiality, Re-Enchantment, and the Spiritual Imagination in Shakespearean Romance
In the final years of his professional life, William Shakespeare’s drama entered the period we now refer to as his “late romances,” plays in which the supernatural world hovers at the edges of all action, and the lines between tragedy and comedy blur. These plays, written and first performed between 1608-1613, pushed the limits of what was considered stageable and believable in the early modern playhouse. In doing so, this collection of plays responded to a post-Reformation crisis of the spiritual imagination–what to believe, and how to conceive of it–through creative experiments in “enchantment”. This thesis argues that these plays amount to a seventeenth-century project of “re-enchantment,” and seeks to amend teleological accounts of “the disenchantment of the world” by suggesting that creative resistance to disenchantment was already in progress in the early seventeenth century. Far from being immaterial fantasy, the plays under consideration in this thesis–Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII (All Is True), and The Two Noble Kinsmen–each materialise post-Reformation spiritual dilemmas in performance, bringing to the forefront drama’s potential to make visible the otherwise invisible facets of spiritual crisis: contested spaces like Purgatory, the vitality of objects such as relics, and the embodied experience of prophecy.
By combining theoretical approaches from areas of ecocriticism, materialism, and affect theory, I explore how the material spaces, objects, and bodies in these texts engage with early modern spiritual dilemmas. Across three case studies, I undertake close readings of theatrical texts in pairs, paying attention to their original performance conditions, and placing them in conversation with each other as well as contemporaneous theological, political, and imaginative writing of the period. In the first case study, I position the oceanic spaces of Pericles and The Tempest as experimental navigations of an alternative Purgatory. In the second, I trace the stage lives of theatrical props in Cymbeline and All Is True as desacralized relics. In the third and final case study, I consider the implications of embodying and producing prophecy in The Winter’s Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Together, these case studies test my theory of “the dramaturgy of enchantment,” to suggest that re-enchantment is an integral part of these plays’ literary construction and reception, with the capacity to induce wonder, awe, terror, and pleasure in the audience. Enchantment is thus positioned as an ambivalent cultural mood; one that can accelerate the decay of damaged sites of spiritual fulfilment, or work to repair them.
Julia Rodwell: From Inception to Interface: Linked Data, Ontologies, and Modelled Instances for Online Exhibition-Making
Beyond the Book: A Digital Journey through the Treasures of the Emmerson Collection is an online exhibition composed of several interconnected parts: prose, images, photogrammetry, and data. Rich photographic reproductions of rare materials from the Emmerson Collection – which contains more than 5000 pamphlets and books from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, mainly produced in England – accompany seven stories on themes related to the collection. These stories are enhanced with contextual information and woven together through curated points of connection, as well as through a Linked Data Index. These elements contribute to the dual objectives of the exhibition: to highlight the richness and materiality of items from the Emmerson Collection for a general audience, and to provide context for this audience via the many people, places, and events that contribute to a book’s journey through time and space – hence, “Beyond the Book.”
To develop the site, I experimented with a new methodology for online exhibition-making: using the cultural heritage ontology CIDOC CRM (International Committee for Documentation / Conceptual Reference Model) and the semantic data platform ResearchSpace, developed by the British Museum, I meticulously modelled, created, and published Linked Data related to the Emmerson Collection as a method of curatorial enquiry. As well as communicating context within the exhibition by making the “junctions” (Obrist) between entities related to the Emmerson Collection explicit, this data encodes it in a versatile and durable form, in a way that can be repurposed and integrated into collection catalogues and resources.
Beyond the Book also addresses a knowledge gap in online exhibition-making: online exhibitions of cultural heritage material typically either replicate the format of physical exhibitions – a static label alongside an image – or, in cases of special projects and collaborations, display a collection of interactive data. In both cases, their capacity to communicate context for objects is limited: to retain viewer attention, label texts need to be short and succinct, and for data to begin to express meaning it needs to be connected and contextualised. Beyond the Book combines both textual narratives and a Linked Data Index to offer the viewer multiple ways into the collection and convey a rich “web of meaning” (Jones) surrounding the collection.
The process of experimenting with this method for online exhibition-making demonstrated its reliance on collaboration; many parties and individuals contributed to and influenced the development of Beyond the Book from inception to interface. Thus, the results of this research project suggest that my method for online exhibition-making is reproducible if the essential role collaboration plays in its application is taken into consideration.