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…

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…

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 –…

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…

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…

I was once told that a professor in discourse analysis – who shall go nameless – said routinely that literary studies had no concepts. I think of this professor often, which is to say every time that I come across a new or interesting literary concept. This week has been particularly good for this, because…

I’ve returned to Cicley Berry’s writing recently, and wanted to register in a blog post how good it is. I mean ‘good’ as both impressively skillful but also ‘good’ as, well, wholesome: the analysis she provides to help actors read difficult texts is exactly the kind of thing that my own academic background has led…

I was one of those pubescent boys who read a lot of Terry Pratchett. I used to hide this fact, and concentrate on my reading all of Dickens, or my other literary exploits. But now I can be more honest, and admit that Pratchett’s writing shaped me and my thinking profoundly, often leading me to…

This is another one of those posts that I am writing a week late but backdating so as to preserve (in a certain sense of the word) a sense of regular progression with my research leave blogging. This time last week I was travelling down to London, ready to run some pilot workshops for a…