CFP: [Theatre] CFP

full name / name of organization: 
Kara Reilly
contact email: 

APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTING

CFP: Performing Science:
Drama, History, Literature

Friday, 4 July 2008
Department of Drama and Theatre Artsâ€"University of Birmingham
Supported in part by University of Birmingham Dean’s Strategic Initiative
Funding

Increasing intersections between natural philosophy, the history of
science, and spectacle demonstrate that theatre history is intellectual
history.
Individual worldviews are shaped by natural philosophy and science, and
it is impossible to underestimate the degree to which a person’s
worldview shapes their creative output.

Popular curiosity often operates in the same arenas as scientific study
where ideas are performed theatrically through spectacle, rhetoric, and
repetition. For instance Richard Altick demonstrates in The Shows of
London that eighteenth and nineteenth-century scientific exhibitions were
a form of popular entertainment not easily separated from the theatre. In
The Player’s Passion Joseph Roach explains how mechanical philosophy
influenced key thinkers, such as Garrick and Diderot. Sixteenth-century
kunstkammern or cabinets of curiosity were often discussed in theatrical
terms that helped create the natural philosophy of the period.

This one day colloquium aims to bring together current work on key issues
in European culture with particular interests in the cross- and
interdisciplinary exchanges between the history of performance and
science.

Our keynote speaker is Professor Jane Goodall whose book Performing
Science: Darwin and the Age of Evolution (2002) is a landmark study of
the impact that evolutionary theory had upon popular performance
traditions in the nineteenth century.

250-500 word abstracts for papers are due 15 April. Please send them
electronically to Kara Reilly k.reilly_at_bham.ac.uk Feel free to send
enquiries too.

Potential Panel Topics Include:
Automata as Performers
Actor Training and Science
Gender/ Sexuality and the Body
Discipline and Science: the Performativity of Ethical Bodies

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Received on Wed Feb 27 2008 - 13:19:13 EST

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