Jane is a co-investigator on UEP, who is working with Kerrie Schaefer on the Dartmoor ecosystem and looking at changing understandings of ‘community’ for the ‘Histories’ work.
I am Associate Professor in Drama at the University of Exeter. My research takes an historical perspective to questions of participation, community, and creativity in contemporary performance and culture, and I draw on contemporary interests to explore British theatre history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Alongside my work on Understanding Everyday Participation, I am also working on an AHRC project on Amateur Dramatics: Crafting Communities in Time and Place, with Helen Nicholson and Nadine Holdsworth, exploring another vibrant arena of participatory cultural activity.
I have published on collaborative performance making, with Dee Heddon, Devising Performance: A Critical History (Palgrave, 2005) and on Modern British Playwriting: The 80s (Methuen, 2012). My interest in actors, playwrights, and popular performance during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has led to articles on Restoration and eighteenth century performers and women writers in Theatre Survey, Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre and Theatre Notebook.
I am working with Kerrie Schaefer on the ‘Histories’ research strand looking at the changing understandings and uses of the term ‘community’ in relation to both participatory cultural practices, and cultural policy in the UK. I am interested in the longer history of informal and amateur participatory performance practices, and what these reveal about how people have imagined their communities and their associational life.
Kerrie and I are also working on the case study based in the Dartmoor area. I am particularly interested in exploring informal performance practices, and understanding more about self-organised groups who actively participate in creating performance and cultural events.
I am very lucky to have been able to turn a misspent youth in amateur theatre into a job. These days my everyday participation involves reading police procedurals and amateur curtain making. I am currently being trained in the complex art of World of Tanks by my six year old.