Research

I am fascinated by what it means to experience a performance as a physical, sensory and intellectual experience. I explore embodied experience through examining circus and aerial performance practice. Although not limited to history, I specialise in the history of aerial performance, circus and vaudeville/variety.

My research into the history of aerial performance demonstrates how our understanding of a moving body is culturally constructed. It is informed by my own amateur aerial practice and driven by a desire to understand its history and what that history might reveal about the form itself. My practice helps me to reconstruct and understand what it might have been like to experience past aerial acts and to consider what the cultural implications of past aerialist’s movements might mean.

My first book explores the celebrity of female aerial performers of the 1920s and early 1930s who have been largely forgotten from history. This was an era when strong and feminine succeeded as soloists in the circus ring, vaudeville and variety stages. Nominated for the 2022 David Bradby monograph award, it has been described as ‘the new champagne of circus academics‘ by industry website, CircusTalk and ‘outstanding’ during the academic peer review process. In this book I situated these women alongside the emerging female sports star and the iconic film star. I talk about:

  • audience experience
  • glamour
  • celebrity
  • performing femininity
  • exercising female bodies and physical culture movements
  • technology in performance
  • space and the transformational nature of practice.

My most recent major research project was the collaborative AHRC funded Theatre and Visual Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century project. My research involved mobilising exhibitions as practice as research and focused on understanding what it is like to be an audience member attending popular entertainments as diverse as panorama, pleasure gardens or hand-operated sandtoys.

More recently, my interest in embodiment and the body-mind benefits of movement and pleasure have led me to become interested in the potential mental health benefits of watching physically dynamic performance.

I communicate my research and those of projects I am involved in via written publications, papers at conferences and public engagement activities.

Funding

My research has generously been funded by:

  • GW4 (Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff & Exeter consortium) Crucible Awards
  • AHRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship
  • AHRC PhD Scholarship
  • AHRC Research Training Support Grant
  • Antony Denning Society for Theatre Research Award
  • TaPRA 2014 Bursary

Academic Record

2017 PhD in Drama, University of Exeter

2012 MA in Performance Research, University of Bristol

2000 BA(Hons) Drama, University of Exeter

Supporting Research

As well as conducting my own research, I have expertise in Research Impact and am developing expertise in Open Access. On this basis, I’ve provided freelance services to universities and higher education organisations committed to improving research culture.