About Us
Our Mission
We formed the R/18 Collective in 2019 to promote professional productions of plays drawn from the Restoration and eighteenth-century repertoire and to support performance research related to those productions. Composed of scholars from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, the Collective seeks both to cultivate strong, reciprocal relationships between scholars and theatre artists and to increase awareness among theatre audiences of the great riches embedded in dramatic works from this era.
We believe these plays provide urgently-needed insights into the formation of the modern world, including the historical development of our current ideas about race, gender, sexuality, nation, and capital.
We are committed to providing the dramaturgical knowledge and services of some of the world's top scholars in the field to theatre companies interested in producing these works as well as to securing collaborative, international grants to support those productions and the related performance research.
Who we're working with
To date, we have worked with Red Bull Theater (New York), Creation Theatre (Oxford), and Against the Grain Theatre (Toronto).
Costume of Sarah Siddons as Hamlet. Sketch by Mary Hamilton (1802).
© The Trustees of the British Museum
Getting in touch
Reach out to us at R18Collective@gmail.com with questions or comments - we would love to hear from you!
If you have suggestions for how we can add to the resources on this site, please use this form.
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CORE MEMBERS
Misty G. Anderson is the James R. Cox Professor and Head of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she also holds courtesy appointments in the departments of Theatre and Religious Studies. Anderson is the author of Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief, and the Borders of the Self (Johns Hopkins, 2012) and Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage (Palgrave, 2002), numerous articles on performance and gender in the long eighteenth-century. She is also a co-editor of the Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama and the Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Performance (2017 and 2019) along with R/18 Collective members Kristina Straub and Danny O’Quinn. She has worked as a dramaturg for the Clarence Brown Theatre and produced a documentary about their 2017 production of The Busy Body. She is currently completing a third book project, God on Stage.
Tracy C. Davis is Barber Professor of Performing Arts at Northwestern University, and specializes in British theatre history; historiography; economics and business history of theatre; performance theory; gender and theatre; research methodology; museum studies; and Cold War studies. She has edited numerous collections, the most recent of which are The Routledge Handbook to Theatre and Performance Historiography (2021, co-edited with Peter W. Marx) and Uncle Tom's Cabins: The Transnational History of America's Most Mutable Book (2018, co-edited with Stefka Mihaylova). A book on the development of activist practices among nineteenth-century liberals and radicals is in progress. She is editor of the monograph series Cambridge Studies in Theatre and Performance Theory and co-editor of the monograph series Transnational Theatre Histories (Palgrave).
Lisa A. Freeman is Professor and Head of the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Character's Theatre: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (UPenn, 2002), and Antitheatricality and the Body Public (UPenn, 2017), which was named the Runner-Up for the Association of Theatre in Higher Education Outstanding Book Award, a Finalist for the Theatre Library Association George Freedley Award, and an Honorable Mention for the Joe A. Callaway Prize. Freeman is the author of "Mourning the Dignity of the Siddonian Form", published in a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Eighteenth-Century Drama, and the editor of the Sarah Siddons volume for Pickering and Chatto's Lives of Shakespearean Actors series. She has published essays on various aspects of eighteenth-century English drama in The Cultural History of Theatre in the Enlightenment (Bloomsbury, 2017), The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730-1830 (Cambridge, 2007), and Players, Playwrights, and Playhouses: Investigating Performance, 1660-1800 (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007). She has just completed an essay on Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music, and has a new essay forthcoming in Theatre Survey on the dramatic theory and criticism of Elizabeth Inchbald.
David F. Taylor is an Associate Professor at Oxford University and a fellow of St. Hugh's College. He is author of Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (OUP, 2012) and The Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760–1830 (Yale UP, 2018), and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737-1832 (OUP, 2014; pbk. 2018). From 2009-10, he worked with the Theatre Royal, Bury St. Edmunds on its 'Restoring the Repertoire' programme of rehearsed readings and productions. In 2017, he curated the exhibition Draw New Mischief: 250 Years of Shakespeare and Political Cartoons at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon, with a version of the exhibition later transferring to the Barbican in London. In 2013, while working at the University of Toronto, he was awarded the Polanyi Prize for Literature by the Government of Ontario.
Kristina Straub Kristina Straub is Professor Emerita of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University where she taught eighteenth-century British studies, theatre and performance studies, gender studies, and sexuality studies. She is the author of Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Kentucky University Press, 1988), Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton, 1991), and Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence Between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth Century Britain (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), as well as numerous articles on eighteenth-century theatre, sexuality, and gender. She co-curated “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and Literary Celebrity” at the Folger Shakespeare Library with Janine Barchas, and has co-edited two new anthologies of eighteenth-century drama (with Misty Anderson and Daniel O’Quinn) for Routledge Press.
Daniel O’Quinn is a Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. His program of research follows two distinct yet intertwined threads: the study of performance cultures in the long eighteenth-century and the vicissitudes of empire in a wide array of locales. He is the author of Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770-1790 (Johns Hopkins, 2011); and Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800 (Johns Hopkins, 2005). The former book examines the mediation of the American War in the British press and in a variety of performance venues. The latter book explores the representation of Anglo-Indian affairs on the London stage and in the theatre of politics at the close of the eighteenth century. His current project, The Post-American Repertoire, brings these earlier concerns together to explore how British culture aesthetically mediated the affective fallout from American decolonization. His new monograph, Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690-1815 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), is a wide-ranging account of diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire that arose from preparing editions of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Embassy Letters, Lady Craven’s Travels through Crimeas to Constantinople, and The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan.
Miles P. Grier is an associate professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery and coeditor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies. His essays on Shakespearean material have appeared in William and Mary Quarterly and the volumes Scripturalizing the Human, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, and Shakespeare/Text. Essays on more contemporary North American topics such as racial profiling after 9/11, Joni Mitchell’s blackface pimp alter ego, President Obama’s Beyoncé-style approach to Black voters, and a review of the film of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom have appeared in Politics and Culture, Genders, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the LA Review of Books.
Chelsea Phillips is a professional dramaturg, theatre historian, and Associate Professor at Villanova University. Her research interests include women, Shakespeare, and the eighteenth-century theatre. She is the author of Carrying All Before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage 1689-1800 (University of Delaware Press, 2022). Her work has appeared in Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, Women's History, and a variety of edited collections. Her article, "Bodies in Play: Maternity, Repertory, and the Rival Romeo and Juliets, 1748-1751" (Theatre Survey, May 2019) won the 2020 Gerald Kahan Scholar's Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). She is also an associate director for the international Perceptions of Pregnancy Researcher’s Network, and co-convenes the Pregnancy and Motherhood working group for the American Society for Theatre Research. As a dramaturg, she has worked with Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael R. Jackson, New Dramatist resident writer J. Julian Christopher, Manhattan Shakespeare Project, the for/word company, Uncut Pages Theatre, and artists from the Royal Shakespeare Company, Folger Shakespeare Theatre, and the American Shakespeare Center, among others.
