Tracy Davis to discuss performance theory April 1

Tracy Davis, the Barber Professor of Performing Arts at Northwestern University and president of the American Society for Theatre Research, will present Washington University’s 2009 Helen Clanton Morrin Lecture at 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 1.

Titled “The Witness Protection Program: Making Theatre, Everyday,” the talk is free and open to the public and sponsored by the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences. It will take place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall, on the university’s Danforth Campus. A reception will immediately follow in Holmes Lounge, located in Ridgley Hall, immediately adjacent to Duncker.

For more information or to RSVP, call the PAD at (314) 935-5858 or email pad@artsci.wustl.edu.

Davis is a specialist in performance theory, theater history and research methodology. She edits the Cambridge University Press series “Theatre and Performance Theory” and serves on the board of numerous journals including TDR: The Drama Review.

Her most recent books are The Cambridge Guide to Performance Studies (2008), Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (2007), The Performing Society: Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History (co-edited with Peter Holland, 2007) and Considering Calamity: Methods for Performance Research (co-edited with Linda Ben-Zvi, 2007).

Other books include Actresses as Working Women: Their Society Identity in Victorian Culture (1991), George Bernard Shaw and the Socialist Theatre (1994), The Economics of the British Stage (2000), Women and Playwrighting in Nineteenth-Century Britain (co-edited with Ellen Donkin, 1999) and Theatricality (with Thomas Postlewait, 2004).

Current projects include The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Performance and Spectacles of the Covert, from which the Morrin Lecture is drawn.

The Helen Clanton Morrin Lecture was established in 1998 in memory of 1994 alumna Helen Clanton Morrin by her children — Peter Morrin, Kevin Morrin and Sheila Humphreys — as well as by friends and colleagues. Previous speakers include the renowned Shakespearean actors Jane Lapotaire and Gareth Armstrong as well as two-time Tony Award-winner Zoe Caldwell.