Academic Career and Digital Innovation
Over my twenty-four years at Royal Holloway University of London, I held leadership roles which focused on social impact, inclusion, cultural engagement and research-led innovation within the Drama Department, the English Subject Centre and the English Department.
I was responsible for the development of two ground-breaking digital projects which embody the intersection of creativity and technological innovation. The first, The Cambridge King Lear CD-ROM: Text and Performance Archive, was designed to unite textual and performance scholars. It brought together ten texts of King Lear, with 500 performance images and essays from a range of scholars, to provide a comprehensive overview of four centuries of the play’s history.
The second project, Designing Shakespeare: an audio-visual archive, 1960-2000, an AHRC-funded project I led as Principal Investigator, documented every professional Shakespeare production in Stratford-upon-Avon and London over a 40-year period. Comprising four separate databases, it catalogued information on 1,100 productions, supported by 3,000 performance images, interviews with leading designers, and ten 3D theatre models. These projects demonstrate my ability to merge data-driven research, creative practice and public engagement.
Beyond Royal Holloway I sat on the advisory boards for the Performing Arts Data Service (Glasgow University), the Textual Studies CTI Centre (Oxford) and An International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio (BUFVC). My consistent aim was to reach the broadest possible audience by developing and utilising digital resources to transform the teaching of Shakespeare in performance, both locally and nationally. Collaborations with leading organisations, including the British Library and the Royal Shakespeare Company. enabled the creation of resources that bridged geographic and cultural divides.
Over the past five years, I have renewed my focus on creative collaboration, particularly with the online hub Digital Theatre Plus, developing resources for schools worldwide. These include five introductory film scripts (covering Plot, Character, Genre, History, and Contemporary Performance) and four interactive Shakespeare editions, which use video clips to highlight key moments and offer three pathways (Language, Character, and Technical Theatre) through four of Shakespeare’s most challenging plays: Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest. These resources support diverse and inclusive pedagogies by highlighting the contributions of Black and Asian theatre companies and the performances of women in traditionally male roles.
