Jo Robinson
Associate Professor in Drama, Faculty of Arts
Contact
Expertise Summary
Jo Robinson was awarded a Lord Dearing Teaching Award by the University in 2010: the nomination, made by a student, recognises 'the real confidence, motivation and ambition that she encourages in students by way of outstanding attention to individuals'.
I am the Director of Teaching in the School of English Studies and is currently leading projects in the School on 'Enhancing feedback' and addressing employability through work related learning.
Undergraduate modules taught: Analysing Performance; Performing Memory in Twentieth Century Theatre; Contemporary Performance: Theatre, History, Place, and in some years, Fin-de-siecle: Melodrama to Modernism. I also contribute lectures to Introduction to Drama and The Long Nineteenth Century: Themes and Transitions, and am a key part of the teaching team on the applied dissertation module in the third year which enables students to observe and participate in the work of local creative industry partners.
Postgraduate modules taught: I contribute to the team taught Issues in Theatre Research Module on the MA Theatre Research, and supervise Independent Projects and dissertations.
Areas of research supervision: My areas of supervision can be broken down into the following areas, which may overlap depending on the interests of my students: theatre history and historiography; theories of reception and the study of audiences; the digital humanities, and nineteenth and twentieth/twenty-first century theatre and performance with a particular focus on place and community.
Recent and current research students: I am currently supervising five research students:
- Gill Brigg, holder of an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, who is working on a collaborative project with the Nottingham Playhouse, 'Performance for audiences with profound and multiple learning difficulties: performances & reception';
- Sam Haddow, who is a School-funded Postgraduate Teaching Fellow, working on a project, 'History (plays)' which focuses on historiographic drama in the context of debates around history and postmodernity;
- Soudabeh Ananisarab, who is just beginning a project, 'George Bernard Shaw and the English Midlands', focusing on Shaw's involvement with the Malvern Festival.
- Billy Cowan, another School-funded Postgraduate Teaching Fellow and Artistic Director of Truant Company (http://www.truantcompany.com/index.htm), who is beginning a project on theatre and madness;
- Makenzi Crouch, beginning research on Youtube Shakespeares.
Research students who have recently completed their PhDs with me include Dr Heather Lilley, who worked on Community and Negotiations of Audience-Performance Relationships in the Theatre of Cartoon de Salvo, Kneehigh Theatre and Northern Stage, and is now Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Greenwich, and Dr Jill Sullivan, who worked on The Business of Pantomime in Nineteenth Century Nottingham and Birmingham, and is now an AHRC-funded postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter.
Research Summary
My main current research is centred on a major project on Victorian theatre and entertainment in Nottingham and the East Midlands. The 'Mapping Performance Culture: Nottingham 1857-1867' project… read more
Selected Publications
ROBINSON, J, PRIESTNALL, G, TYLER-JONES, R and BURGESS, R, 2011. Mapping the Moment: A spatio-temporal interface for studying performance culture, Nottingham, 1857–1867 International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing. 5(2), 103-126 ROBINSON, J, 2010. Mapping the Field: Moving through Landscape Performance Research: Fieldworks. 15(4), 86-96 ROBINSON, J, 2010. Mapping the Place of Pantomime in a Victorian Town. In: DAVIS, J, ed., Victorian Pantomime: A Collection of Critical Essays Palgrave. 137-154
ROBINSON, J, 2008. The Performance of Anti-theatrical Prejudice in a Provincial Victorian Town: Nottingham and its New Theatre Royal, 1865 Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film. 35(2), 10-28
Current Research
My main current research is centred on a major project on Victorian theatre and entertainment in Nottingham and the East Midlands. The 'Mapping Performance Culture: Nottingham 1857-1867' project investigates the performance and entertainment culture of the regional town of Nottingham in the mid-nineteenth-century. In a collaboration with Dr Gary Priestnall from the School of Geography which has been supported by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, we have developed an interactive map of Nottingham which will enable the user to find out about the kinds of performances and entertainments which were happening in the town, and about the audiences who might have attended those performances. Working in partnership with local archives, museums and libraries, the site enables digital access to a large amount of material on entertainment and social culture which has been previously difficult to access, collected from newspapers, diaries, playbills and other sources.
The map of Nottingham which forms the centrepiece of this website is designed to make the data collected through the project accessible to both local historians and academic researchers in a context which stresses the interconnectedness of sites of entertainment - and the performances themselves - within the boundaries of the nineteenth century town. In doing so, it will enable us to bring new methodologies to researching the interrelationships of both repertoire and spectatorship in theatre history.
Please visit the Mapping Performance Culture website
In terms of supervising research, my current interests thus cover nineteenth century theatre history, historiographical research and questions more widely, and research on site, space and performance, and I would be happy to discuss potential research projects with prospective students.
View my vodcast about Theatre History.
Past Research
My PhD thesis - and a number of published articles resulting from that doctoral research - focused on areas of theatre and performance from a feminist perspective. It revisited the history of hysteria in order to re-centre attention on the symptomatic acts of the performing body on stage in performances ranging from nineteenth century melodrama through Ibsen to contemporary feminist works. I therefore have ongoing interests in representations of madness in theatre in past and contemporary works, in gender and performance, and in the history of acting, particularly on the nineteenth century stage. I would be happy to supervise PhD research in these areas.
Future Research
The work on Nottingham, and on the questions of mapping theatre history which arise from it, is ongoing. As well as developing various articles about different aspects of the project, I am currently working on a book length project which will explore the wider historiographical questions emerging from the project.