Gastvortrag: Tracy C. Davis (Northwestern University)

“Bildung”. The role of performance in self-cultivation in 19th-century London

For mid-nineteenth-century activists, to be fully conversant in politics required knowledge of how current events and topics were disseminated not only in parliament and newspapers but also in theatres, ethnographic exhibitions, trade fairs, and public ceremonials. In this study of the formative years of liberal theory, the focus falls on how performance functioned in the middle-classes’ Bildung: especially, how someone with modest means but a calling to serve others could utilize awareness of performance to become a human rights activist and a journalist, lobbyist, organizer, and liberal advocate whose effects registered around the globe.

Tracy C. Davis is Ethel M. Barber Professor of Performing Arts and Professor of English and Theatre at Northwestern University. She specializes in performance theory, theatre historiography and research methodology, and has produced a broad range of outstanding publications, including the recent Uncle Tom’s Cabins. The Transnational Histories of America’s Most Mutable Book (University of Michigan Press 2018), A Cultural History of Theatre (Bloomsbury 2017), The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century British Performance (Broadview Press 2012), The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (Cambridge University Press 2008), and Stages of Emergency. Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Duke University Press 2007).