Research Expertise and Interest

performance history/historiography, British performance 1650-1800, British literature 1650-1800, disability, gender, social geography, set design

Research Description

Julia Fawcett’s interests include Restoration and eighteenth-century theater and performance, performance historiography, the intersections between literature and performance, urban space, celebrity, gender, and disability studies. Her most recent book, Movable Londons: Performance and the Modern City (due out from University of Michigan Press in September of 2025) seeks to understand how unpropertied Londoners (servants, women, religious minorities, immigrants, and enslaved people) shaped the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666--and how the introduction of changeable scenery to the public stage around the same time provided Londoners with a tool for spotlighting and for studying their contributions.  Her first book, Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696-1801 (University of Michigan Press, 2016) was a finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theater Library Association; it examines the performance and literary strategies that England’s first celebrities used to protect their private lives despite always being in the public eye–and how their strategies might help us to navigate a world in which social media has eroded the distinctions between private lives and public events. Fawcett has served as a dramaturge in New York and as a scholar-in-residence at Harbourfront World Stage in Toronto; her essays have appeared in PMLA, Theatre Survey, Eighteenth Century Studies, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Modern Drama.