Professor Jan Clarke, Durham University January – March 2014
Jan Clarke is Professor of French at Durham University. Her first degree was in French and Theatre Studies and she has continued to occupy the liminal space between these two disciplines, examining the practical, material and social conditions surrounding the performance of the play text.
She has authored three books on the Guénégaud theatre in Paris and over fifty articles on topics including theatre architecture, stage design, the uses of music in spectacular productions, and company administration, with a particular focus on the participation of women.
Professor Clarke is acknowledged as the leading expert on practical theatre in seventeenth-century France. Her work has been published in French and English and, most recently, Portuguese. She is frequently invited to lecture in France and the US and last year gave a keynote talk in Brazil. She has twice served as Visiting Professor (in Bloomington and Kansas) and has on-going research collaborations with a number of other institutions, including the Comédie-Française. She has edited Seventeenth-French Studies, served as General Secretary of the Society for French Studies and is currently Secretary General of the International Federation for Theatre Research.
Professor Clarke is presently engaged on two major projects: an edition of the machine plays and operas of Thomas Corneille, for which she was awarded a BA/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship, and an examination of the nine years (1680-89) during which the Guénégaud served as the first home of the Comédie-Française. During her IAS Fellowship, she will develop her work on stage lighting. It is generally thought it was not until the nineteenth century that theatre house lights were dimmed and that previously actors and audience had bathed in a shared illumination. Yet the technology to enable blackout existed far earlier. Professor Clarke will, therefore, seek to discover if there is evidence of an earlier darkening of the auditorium as well as of the technologies employed in the creation of lighting effects. She also hopes to determine what the audience would have been able to see in different lit environments.
Dr Angharad Closs Stephens, Durham University October – December 2013
Angharad Closs Stephens is Lecturer in Human Geography at Durham University. She holds a Master’s degree in GenderStudies (LSE) and a Master’s and PhD in International Relations (Keele University).
Her research interests derive from a general interest in developing critical approaches to the study and politics of nationalism. This work combines several lines of inquiry, including, the politics of security and the governing of differences; how ideas of space/time enable different ways of imagining and understanding politics; and how urban theories and writings on cities offer an alternative entry point to the study of coexistence.
This work was brought together in her first monograph which was published in 2013, The Persistence of Nationalism: from imagined communities to urban encounters (New York, London: Routledge). Her book addresses the difficulties of thinking and acting politically in ways that refuse the politics of nationalism and offers a detailed study of how contemporary attempts by theorists of cosmopolitanism and globalism to go beyond the nation often reproduces key aspects of what she terms, a ‘nationalist imaginary.’
Work on the politics of security has included a co-edited book (with Dr Nick Vaughan-Williams) studying critical responses to the London bombings of 7 July 2005, Terrorism and the Politics of Response (2009) and a number of research articles exploring different aspects of the ‘imaginative geographies’ of the War on Terror (2007, 2011). The interest in reformulating ideas of coexistence has also been developed in a research article on sites of memory in Berlin (2010) and a co-written article (with Dr Vicki Squire) that uses an art installation to rework the idea of ‘community’ (2012).
Dr Closs Stephens’ Fellowship will enable her to address in greater depth how literary texts engage the question of what it means to coexist with others across times and cultures. Her time at the IAS will enable her to establish the intellectual foundations for her next monograph, tentatively titled, Nationalist Atmospheres.
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