Recipient organisationUniversity of ExeterSource-published name: University of Exeter
Funding£2.0M
PeriodJan 2024 — Dec 2028
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Theatre history has been written as if women were barely there—WOMENTHEATRENET sets out to prove otherwise. The project tackles a gap in knowledge: although women worked extensively in 19th-century theatre, their contributions have been systematically minimised by male-dominated archives, national histories, and hierarchies that dismissed their work as less valuable. By tracing the transnational networks of women in Britain, Ireland, Australia, India, and France, the research will recover how female practitioners exchanged ideas, translated plays, and built careers across commercial stages and alternative performance spaces. If successful, the project will rewrite the standard history of Western theatre, shifting women from the margins to the centre. This is primarily fundamental research in the humanities—it will not change a manufacturing process or a medical diagnostic. But a deeper understanding of how cultural value is constructed and whose work gets remembered has implications for how archives are built, how theatre is taught, and how future generations of practitioners see their own place in history.
View original technical description
What would a history of 19th-century Western theatre look like if the work of women were placed at its centre? WOMENTHEATRENET poses this fundamental question to effect a paradigm shift in the historiography of mainstream western theatre in the long 19th century. The current state of knowledge suggests that women have always been active in the theatre, but their work has been obscured by gendered and classed hierarchies of aesthetic value, and entrenched practices of documentation. The agency and innovation of women's work is minimised, and women's cultural networks regarded as subordinate to networks of powerful male practitioners. This state of the art is exacerbated by the dominance of national theatre histories and élite institutions in most theatre historiography. WOMENTHEATRENET will make women's theatre work visible through a series of exemplary case studies of the interlinked theatrical cultures of Britain, Ireland, Australia and India, which will investigate and make visible transnational female-centred networks of creative and intellectual exchange. These case studies will be complemented by a study of women's exchanges and networks in Britain and France. The research team, together with a scholarly network of invited Visiting Fellows, will analyse the conditions of women's theatre work as a form of cultural citizenship, within practices of exchange, circulation, translation, and adaptation, in mainstream commercial theatre and 'paratheatrical' practices. WOMENTHEATRENET will examine archival data of women's theatre work in a) the popular and mainstream theatre (including translation and adaptation); b) paratheatrical work (performances outside established theatre spaces); and c) writing for and about the theatre, in the transnational and imperial networks of the 19th century. The research will be disseminated through book-length publications, articles, a research through practice programme, and international scholarly meetings.
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