Stephen Watkins
Teaching Associate in Literature, Faculty of Arts
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Biography
BA(Hons) (Soton); MA (York); PhD (Soton).
I joined the School of English at the University of Nottingham as a Teaching Associate in Literature in September 2023. Prior to that, I was Departmental Lecturer in English and Tutorial Fellow at St. John's College, University of Oxford; I have also taught at the Universities of Southampton and Derby. I hold a PhD (2019) and BA(Hons) (2013), both in English, from Southampton and an MA in Renaissance Literature, 1500-1700, from the University of York (2015). I am a Fellow of AdvanceHE (formerly the Higher Education Academy) and I am an active member of the American Society for 18th-Century Studies (ASECS), the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS), Medieval English Theatre (METh), and the English Association (EA). I currently serve as Chair of the Premodern Performance Cultures Network, an international forum for scholars, students, and practitioners interested in any aspect of pre-1800 performance around the globe.
Expertise Summary
My primary research interests are in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, theatre, and performance: Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, especially comedy, and opera; multimedia forms, including masque, opera, and the 'paper stage', and interdisciplinary approaches to these - drawing together literary studies, theatre history, musicology, and performance studies; ideas of imitation, influence, and copying; the economics, personnel, and management of Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre and opera companies; notions of competition, collaboration, and commercialism; the politics of performance; and the development and curation of theatrical repertories, both in the long eighteenth century and today.
Teaching Summary
At undergraduate level, I convene the third-year module 'Reformation and Revolution: English Literature and Drama, 1588-1688'. I also lecture and lead seminars on the second-year module, 'From… read more
Research Summary
I am currently completing a short monograph for Cambridge University Press's 'Shakespeare in Performance' Elements series, which is due out in early 2024. The Element, Acting Shakespeare in the… read more
At undergraduate level, I convene the third-year module 'Reformation and Revolution: English Literature and Drama, 1588-1688'. I also lecture and lead seminars on the second-year module, 'From Talking Horses to Romantic Revolutionaries: Literature, 1700-1830', as well as the first-year module, 'Studying Literature'.
At postgraduate level, I offer supervision on topics related to my research areas: early modern and eighteenth-century literature and culture, Shakespeare and performance, and literature and music.
Current Research
I am currently completing a short monograph for Cambridge University Press's 'Shakespeare in Performance' Elements series, which is due out in early 2024. The Element, Acting Shakespeare in the Restoration, explores how Shakespeare was performed by the first generation of actors to work with his scripts after the reopening of the theatres in 1660. During this period, many of Shakespeare's plays were adapted and changed to better suit the new circumstances of the Restoration theatre: extensive musical episodes were added, along with painted scenery, and more (and more complex) parts for women, who were now played by actresses rather than boy apprentices. By asking what skills these new texts required of their performers, the Element offers up a new understanding of Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare and how they encouraged particular kinds of performance.
I have recently written a number of chapters and journal articles on a range of topics related to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century performance, including a chapter on 'Playbook Punctuation in the Restoration and Eighteenth-Century' for the forthcoming three-volume Cambridge History of Punctuation in English Literature, and an article on Restoration drama in performance and print for Huntington Library Quarterly.
Past Research
Previous research has explored the arrested development of English opera in the 1650s, as well as notions of adaptation, imitation, and education in the works of John Dryden and other Restoration playwrights.
Future Research
My next solo-authored project will be a study of literary and theatrical imitation in the long eighteenth century (c.1650-1830). It will explore how writers in this period understood notions of copying, plagiarism, originality, and innovation, and how they moved across and between established genres to offer up works based on past exemplars but that nonetheless represented original contributions to a broadening cultural ecosystem. A central aspect of this project will be the examination of a number of manuscript witnesses to plays submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for licensing, known as the Larpent Collection, now held at the Huntington Library in California. These documents contain many adaptations of pre-1642 plays, and my study will investigate precisely how this material was recycled by later theatre makers for new and changing audiences in the eighteenth century.
With colleagues from the University of Exeter, I am also developing a performance-as-research project on mid-seventeenth-century performance texts, including Davenant's 1656 opera The Siege of Rhodes. This project will bring together scholars of early modern literature, actors trained in historical performance, and early music specialists to explore how this material was originally performed and how it might speak to audiences today.