Roehampton University
Open Spaces. Open Minds.
School of Arts
Dr Clare McManus
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Job Title: Reader (English Literature) Qualifications: MA (Hons), MA, PhD Telephone: +44 (0)20 8392 8124 Email Address: C.McManus@roehampton.ac.uk |
Research interests
My research focuses on gender and early modern literature and theatre, and several of my publications deal with the neglected but growing field of Renaissance women’s performance. I’m interested in the interpretation of performance as a means of reading early modern dramatic texts, and my first book (Women on the Renaissance Stage, MUP, 2002) explores Anna of Denmark’s masquing via literature, performance, dance, costume, scenery, portraiture and architecture. I’ve also edited a collection of essays (Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), which broadens this interest out to consider both women’s performance and authorship within the courts of the Stuart queens consort, Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria. My interest in women’s performance is ongoing, and a forthcoming article (‘When is a woman not a woman? Or, fantasies of Jacobean performance’, Modern Philology, Feb 2008) explores the ways in which masque texts record the impact of the staged female body via a form of textual transvestism.
I’m also interested in early modern cultural geographies, both within the ‘British Isles’ and in European colonialism in the ‘East’. I’m currently editing John Fletcher’s play, The Island Princess, for Arden Early Modern Drama and have written chapters on the interactions between the cultures of early modern England, Ireland and Scotland in The Oxford Short History of the ‘British Isles’: The Seventeenth Century and Theatre Crossing Borders: Transnational and Transcultural Exchange in Early Modern Drama (Ashgate 2008). As part of this work, I’m a member of the steering group for the international collaborative theatre research group based at New York University, Theatre Without Borders (see http://www.nyu.edu/projects/theaterwithoutborders/)
I am also a co-editor of the theoretical anthology, Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader (OUP, 2005). This collection introduces students to recent developments in critical thinking and the book is used as the central spine for the MA in Early Modern Literature and Culture (1500-1700). Future projects include editing 'Othello' for the Norton Complete Shakespeare (3rd edition).
I would be very interested in hearing from prospective doctoral students. I have just started co-supervising an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award student, with Dr. Richard Johns of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. The student is undertaking doctoral work on the Queen's House at Greenwich as a site of queenship.
As part of my collaboration with the National Maritime Museum, I am organising a conference on the relationship between women's Renaissance performance and canonical Renaissance dramatic texts at the Queen's House in July 2010. (Please see http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/researchcentres/renaissance/actress/index.html).
Teaching interests
I teach on the new MA in Early Modern Literature and Culture, an interdisciplinary MA which draws on the School of Art's expertise in Classical Studies, English Literature, Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, and History.
On the undergraduate curriculum, I teach specialist modules on The Shakespearean Stage and Staging Gender and a second-year survey module on Early Modern Literature.
Supervision
I have supervised successful doctorates on Shakespeare on film, the children's playing companies of early modern London, early modern women's writing in Ireland, and the dance history of the Stuart masque. I would be interested in supervising projects on gender in the early modern period, on theatre history and performance, on Renaissance patronage, feminism, editing, or Renaissance cultural geographies. Such projects might be interdiscplinary or based primarily in early modern literature.
Office hours
Publications
(2008) ‘Epicene in Edinburgh (1672): City Comedy Beyond the London Stage’, Theatre Crossing Borders: Transnational and Transcultural Exchange in Early Modern Drama, ed. by Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson (Ashgate Press).
(2008) 'Sex, Gender and Performance on the Early Modern Stage', The Palgrave Guide to Early Modern Women's Writing, ed. Suzanne Trill, Palgrave Macmillan.
(2008) 'What Ish My Nation?:The Cultures of the Seventeenth-Century 'British Isles', The Short Oxford History of the British Isles, ed. Jenny Wormald, Oxford University Press.
(2008) 'When is a woman not a woman? Or, Jacobean fantasies of female performance (1606-1611)', Modern Philology, 105:3.
(2007) ‘Women and English Renaissance Drama: Making and Unmaking “The All-Male Stage”', Literature Compass , 4.
(2007) 'Gender, Performance and National Identity: Women and Seventeenth-Century European Theatre', Attending to Early Modern Women: Structures and Subjectivities, ed. Joan Hartman and Adele Seeff, Associated University Presses.
(2006) 'The Roaring Girl and the London Underworld', Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, ed. Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, Oxford University Press, 213-24.
Ewan Fernie, Ramona Wray, Mark Thornton Burnett, Clare McManus (2005) Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader, Oxford University Press.
(2005) 'Shakespeare: Late Plays', The Year's Work in English Studies, 84.
(2004) 'Shakespeare: Late Plays', The Year's Work in English Studies, 83, 366-71.
(2003) 'Shakespeare: Late Plays', The Year's Work in English Studies, 82, 374-81.
(2003) Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens, Palgrave Macmillan.
(2002) 'Shakespeare: Late Plays', The Year's Work in English Studies, 81, 433-38.
(2002) Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court (1590-1619), Manchester University Press.
(2000) 'Marriage and the Performance of the Romance Quest: Anne of Denmark and the Stirling Baptismal Ceremonies for Prince Henry', A Palace in the Wild: Essays on Vernacular Culture and Humanism in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, ed. L.A.J.R. Houwen, A.A. MacDonald, S.L. Mapstone, Peeters, 175-98.
(1998) 'Defacing the Carcass: Anne of Denmark and Jonson's Masque of Blackness', Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics and the Jonsonian Canon, ed. Julie Sanders, Kate Chedgzoy and Susan Wiseman, Macmillan Press, 93-113.
(----) John Fletcher, The Island Princess, Arden Early Modern Drama.
Research Expertise
Women and gender in the English and European Renaissance; the history of the Stuart queens' courts; women on the Renaissance stage; theatre history.