James Harriman-Smith

Category: Blog

  • The Comma

    One of the most fascinating things about publishing my first book is to see how it has slowly made the journey from a bunch of files on my computer, to something that you can find in shops, libraries, webstores, and even in my hands. There’s a lot to say about the process, but this post…

  • My book is going to be published!

    I wasn’t quite sure what to call this post, and went for the enthusiastic title mainly because I’m still trying to persuade myself that this thing is going to come to pass. In fact, it’s going to come to pass quite imminently. My book’s profile on the CUP website announces publication in March 2021, which…

  • Using Gather.Town for Theatre

    Hello. This is a post about using gather.town to teach theatre, especially theatre history. Gather is a website that allows you to create an online world in the delightful style of a 90s 2D RPG (think Pokemon, or Zelda, on the Game Boy). You can then wander around that world, invite your friends to it,…

  • Spokes and Wheels

    There are only a few days of 2020 left, and I wanted to jot something down here while the memory of the last three months of teaching is still fairly fresh. I don’t think it’s a particularly new or powerful observation, but, at the end of this awful year, it seems important to capture whatever…

  • Who’s reading?

    This post is brought to you by a conversation in a pub after a research seminar. A PhD student told me then that she had attended a workshop on academic blogging where my blog (either this whole site, or just the archive of my own doctoral research) was brought up for study. I had no…

  • Research Leave Overview

    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…

  • Ambiguous Endings

    My research leave ended on 16th June, and so my last proper research post was that published on the 9th. This post, and perhaps one other, however, occupy a kind of grey zone, because – although my leave is definitely and officially over – I am kind of carrying on as I was before: there…

  • Two Workshops

    This week and back in April I ran two, two-day workshops at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond-upon-Thames. I’m grateful to the theatre for making a rehearsal room available to me, to the two actors – Debra Baker and Alex Warner – I worked with in my first workshop, and to the two directors –…

  • A Macklin Mystery

    I write this on the way to some workshops in London, for which I spent much of this week preparing material. This involved reading (and rereading) a lot of eighteenth-century acting manuals, during the course of which I came across the following mysterious assertion. The voice of the Actor must alter in its intonations, according…

  • Quick Thought about Gesture

    I have been talking to more directors recently, and one such conversation helped me think about gesture a little better than before. Gesture is a crucial part of the eighteenth-century stage: actors’ attitudes were frequently commented on, and books and manuals both reproduce classical oratorical rules for using the body and proffer their own advice…