You can read all twenty of the posts I wrote during my research leave in semester two of the 2018-19 academic year by following this tag. Looking over them, I would divide the leave into the following parts.

The hangover, when I was still thinking about teaching and assessment and needed to empty my brain of some ideas that I’d been cogitating on these topics. This covers the posts 1-3: Research Leave Begins, The Speed of Criticism and Teaching Assessment.

The old ways, when I was finishing off research commitments that I had made and maintaining my usual routines of library-visiting and game-playing. This covers another three posts (4-6): Magical Thinking, Book Manuscript, and Library Collection.

The American period, when I had handed in my book manuscript and was either preparing for, working in or looking back on Denver and Washington DC. There are four posts here (7-11): Knights of the Roundtable, #ASECSat50, Findings in the Folger and Another Finding in the Folger.

The uncertain times, when I was back from American and faced with the question of what I wanted my first research after the PhD to be about. I responded to this challenge by being despondent, deciding to apply for a grant, by learning Japanese (I’m still doing that) and by writing about my teenage reading habits. I did all of that across four weeks’ of posts (12-15): A Slump, I Speak English, Getting Grant and Terry Pratchett.

The new stuff, when I ordered a ton of books about acting theory from across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with the intention of exploring how what I knew about eighteenth-century acting theory related to it. Three posts give a hint of what was going on (16-18): Quick Note on Cicely Berry, Concepts, and Quick Thought about Gesture. Strikingly, these posts look a bit like the kind of thing I was writing during my PhD.

Finally, there is the projector (I’d like to recover this word) stretch, when I decided to make a go of my reading and – using the workshops I’d got funding for – try and see how to make something out of my knowledge of eighteenth-century thinking about acting. This resulted in some fun days at the Orange Tree Theatre and even a book proposal. Some chronicle of all this can be found in the last three posts of the leave (19-21): A Macklin Mystery, Two Workshops and Ambiguous Endings. Also, I suppose this post counts too.

So there you have it, six months of leave and everything from the hangover to the projector passing through the old, the American, the uncertain and the new. Maybe I’ll use these terms when it comes to my turn to give the traditional ‘What I did on my Research Leave’ talk – a title that always makes me think of Twoflower.