Tracy C Davis
Biographic Data
| ID | 292765 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tracy C Davis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tracy C |
| FAMILY NAME | Davis |
| SIGNATURE | DAVIS T C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1706-1785 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies
We often know performance when we see it – but how should we investigate it? And how should we interpret what we find out? This book demonstrates why and how mixed methods research is necessary for investigating and explaining performance and advancing new critical agendas in cultural study. The wide range of aesthetic forms, cultural meanings, and social functions found in theatre and performance globally invites a corresponding variety of resea…
Liberal Lives and Activist Repertoires: Political Performance and Victorian Social Reform
This ambitious study traces the strategies of human rights activists to show how world-changing reform movements were shaped by women and men from modest backgrounds who were deeply attuned to the power of performance. Tracy C. Davis explores nineteenth-century reform campaigns through the pioneering work of a family of activists – prominent anti-slavery lecturer George Thompson, his daughter Amelia (the first female theatre and music critic for …
Educating Bilingual Social Workers for the Child Welfare Workforce: A Distributive Justice Approach
Spanish/English bilingual (SEB) speaking social workers are in high demand, particularly in the area of Child Welfare. Most require training and institutional support to increase their cultural and linguistic competence, yet the majority receive no specific education or support. As a result, many encounter inequities in the workforce. Research points to several elements that are essential to the education and development of SEB social workers. Th…
Mermaids as market creators: Cultural entrepreneurship in an emerging practice
With the example of the emergence of professional mermaids, this article shows how primarily young, female enterprising performers developed a new aesthetic category, generated employment from it, and in that way created a market for their services and products. To conceptualize this development, the article employs the Callonian program in market studies into research on cultural entrepreneurship, highlighting that markets are constantly in-the-…
Skills and strategies of activist mermaids: From pretty to powerful pictures
One of the most noteworthy characteristics of the mermaiding community, which has arisen since the early 2000s when self-styled performers started to impersonate the mermaid myth, consists in the performers positioning of themselves as ocean conservation advocates. Pictures constitute a main resource for this advocacy. But how can pretty pictures become powerful tools drawing attention to the critical state of the climate? What does it take to ma…
Aquarium Mermaids: Multiskilled Entrepreneurs in the Creative Economy
Since 2011, multiskilled “entreployees” have navigated the creative economy and forged employment for themselves in aquariums around the world. These mermaid performers plunge into tanks and portray chimerical “belonging” in the aquatic environment. While mermaid shows can easily be debunked as gimmicky commercial entertainment that exploits female sexuality, performers display exceptional skills and not only instill belief in mermaids in young v…
Introduction from Uncle Tom's Cabins: The Transnational History of America's Most Mutable Book (2018)
Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Actresses
Actresses’ peripatetic working lives pose a special opportunity for the social history of gendered autonomy and family life, especially across North American expanses in the era when stagecoach travel gave way to railways and sail to steamships. Nan Mullenneaux focuses on actresses’ memoirs, emphasizing family configuration, marital status, class, and parenting responsibility. While she overlooks important interlocutors among theater historians—J…
How Do You Know a Mermaid When You See One? How Do You See a Mermaid When You Know One
Whether as tailed chimeras or human-shaped naiads, merfolk have preoccupied the European imagination since the Greeks. Inspired by Fouquet's 1811 novella, opera and ballet adaptations of the Undine myth proliferated on the nineteenth-century Germanic stage. Recognizing this tradition has implications for the locus of "blue humanities" and situates the crux of the nonhuman embodiment problem in theatre practice, which epitomizes three-dimensional …
How Do You Know a Mermaid When You See One? How Do You See a Mermaid When You Know One? A Photo Essay
How Do You Know a Mermaid When You See One?How Do You See a Mermaid When You Know One? A Photo Essay Tracy C. Davis (bio) In twenty-first-century Westernized culture, mer-creatures are currently understood to take a specific form: a human (usually female) upper body that becomes scaly from the hips downward, lacking legs or feet and culminating in a double-fluked tail. Prior to the Enlightenment, this was not the case: mer-creatures in illustrati…
Uncle Tom's Cabins: The Transnational History of America's Most Mutable Book
As Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin traveled around the world, it was molded by the imaginations and needs of international audiences. For over 150 years it has been coopted for a dazzling array of causes far from what its author envisioned. This book tells thirteen variants of Uncle Tom's journey, explicating the novel's significance for Canadian abolitionists and the Liberian political elite that constituted the runaway character…
Performance Studies in Canada
September 01 2018 Performance Studies in Canada Performance Studies in Canada. Edited by LauraLevin and MarlisSchweitzer. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017; 448 pp.; illustrations. $120.00 cloth, $39.95 paper, e-book available. Tracy C. Davis Tracy C. Davis Tracy C. Davis is Barber Professor of Performing Arts at Northwestern University. Uncle Tom’s Cabins: The Transnational History of America’s Most Mutable Book, edite…
Welcome to the Experience Election
The US federal government spends over $80 billion a year on education, yet the electorate’s powers of reasoning are waning
A Cultural History of Theatre: A Desideratum
Theatre is predominantly a social form. Social history, which invites perspectives from “below,” stories of resistance, and awareness of how social organization stratifies, has had a profound effect on theatre studies since the 1970s. A wide scholarly purview on performative forms dates from the later nineteenth century, but social history changed awareness about historical contiguities of categories of community, amateur, and folk performance; t…
British Drama of the Industrial Revolution by Frederick Burwick
Reviewed by: British Drama of the Industrial Revolution by Frederick Burwick Tracy C. Davis BRITISH DRAMA OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. By Frederick Burwick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015; pp. 320. Brander Matthews called Eugène Scribe’s characters “silhouettes,” or mere “profiles,” an impression of nineteenth-century playwriting that the book under review in no way counters. The criterion here is instead action—not individuality or…
The Witness Security Program: Becoming Imperceptible in the Relocation Matrix
How are relocated witnesses in the US federal witness security program equipped to “hide in plain sight” and remain untraceable? Two models of social identity combine to account for this—social role play (Goffman) and performativity (Butler, Barad, Braidotti)—as an immanent process of “becoming-imperceptible.”
Routes of Blackface
Throughout its history, blackface minstrelsy has been at once potent and slippery, notoriously difficult to control as signification. When one race impersonates another and bills it as entertainment, reception becomes a barometer of ethnic hegemony, interracial politics, and power. The essays in this issue of TDR challenge and contribute to the historiography of blackface by examining previously untapped evidence, questioning current orthodoxies …
I Long for My Home in Kentuck”: Christy's Minstrels in Mid-19th-Century Britain
Christy's Minstrels set a new standard for minstrel performance in mid-Victorian Britain. Yet reception was far from monolithic: the cultural affiliations of audiences led to important regional differences in reception, including room for racialist perspectives complicated by religion, nationalism, class, and antislavery convictions
Forging an English Bohemia
Forging an English Bohemia Tracy C. Davis (bio) The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830–1870. By Jacky Bratton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; pp. 230. 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in late Victorian Britain. By Nicholas Freeman. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011; pp. 248. Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperi…
Acting Black, 1824: Charles Mathews's Trip to America
Charles Mathews's notoriety in American studies and theatre history hinges on his portrayal of an African American actor as an antic buffoon who mispronounces Shakespeare's verse, acts histrionically, and interpolates the song "Possum Up a Gum Tree" in the midst of a soliloquy. Careful attention to evidence of Trip to America reveals five additional African American characters. This essay explores Mathews's performative techniques in portraying a…
The performing century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre's History
List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Series Introduction: Redefining British Theatre History P.Holland Introduction: The Performing Society T.C.Davis & P.Holland PART I: PERFORMANCE OCCASIONS Boxing Day J.Davis What Are Faries For? T.C.Davis Communal Performances: Royal Ritual, Revolution, and National Acts E.Allen George Edwardes and Musical Comedy: The Transformations of London Theatre and Society, 1878-1914 T.Postlewait PART II: PERFORM…
Concerning Theory for Performance Studies
In 2007, Routledge published Theory for Performance Studies as part of its Theory 4 series, listing Philip Auslander as author. When, in August, The Chronicle of Higher Education revealed that much of the book was lifted word-for-word from the template for the series, Theory for Religious Studies by Timothy K. Beal and William E. Deal, TDR editor Richard Schechner convened via email and phone conversations a “TDR Forum,” asking leaders in the fie…
The Cambridge companion to performance studies
Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense
The Performing Century
This book looks at modes of performance and forms of theatre in Nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland. On subjects as varied as the vogue for fairy plays to the representation of economics to the wor
Detecting the deceit of the motivated liar
The Actress in Victorian Pornography
Decades before the theories of conditioned reflexes and behavior modification were expounded in England, moral reformers recognized that to control passions in the Skinnerian boxes of Victorian theatres passionate stimuli must be checked. The need to control passionate stimuli was a concern limited to a few, for only a few who understood the stimulants and the nature of the passions were willing to eradicate a socially sanctioned source of so muc…
Theatrical Antecedents of the Mall that Ate Downtown
Mermaids as market creators: Cultural entrepreneurship in an emerging practice
With the example of the emergence of professional mermaids, this article shows how primarily young, female enterprising performers developed a new aesthetic category, generated employment from it, and in that way created a market for their services and products. To conceptualize this development, the article employs the Callonian program in market studies into research on cultural entrepreneurship, highlighting that markets are constantly in-the-…
A Cultural History of Theatre: A Desideratum
Theatre is predominantly a social form. Social history, which invites perspectives from “below,” stories of resistance, and awareness of how social organization stratifies, has had a profound effect on theatre studies since the 1970s. A wide scholarly purview on performative forms dates from the later nineteenth century, but social history changed awareness about historical contiguities of categories of community, amateur, and folk performance; t…
I Long for My Home in Kentuck”: Christy's Minstrels in Mid-19th-Century Britain
Christy's Minstrels set a new standard for minstrel performance in mid-Victorian Britain. Yet reception was far from monolithic: the cultural affiliations of audiences led to important regional differences in reception, including room for racialist perspectives complicated by religion, nationalism, class, and antislavery convictions
Acting Black, 1824: Charles Mathews's Trip to America
Charles Mathews's notoriety in American studies and theatre history hinges on his portrayal of an African American actor as an antic buffoon who mispronounces Shakespeare's verse, acts histrionically, and interpolates the song "Possum Up a Gum Tree" in the midst of a soliloquy. Careful attention to evidence of Trip to America reveals five additional African American characters. This essay explores Mathews's performative techniques in portraying a…
Do You Believe in Fairies: The Hiss of Dramatic License
When Peter Pan asks audiences to affirm their belief in fairies in order to revive Tinker Bell, this can be interpreted as an affirmation of the willing suspension of disbelief thought to be an essential condition of theatrical spectating. However, closer analysis of the original 1904 production of Peter Pan, including its variation from conventional pantomime, reveals the intertext of two contemporaneous debates in ethnology: the idea that the l…
The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660-1700
Illustrations A note on styling, dates and editions used Preface Introduction 1. The arrival of the actress 2. Sex and violence: the exploitation of the actress in Restoration drama 3. The actress, the dramatist and comedy 4. Life overwhelming fiction: how actresses' own personalities affected their roles 5. Elizabeth Barry and the development of Restoration tragedy 6. The actress as dramatic prostitute/mistress 7. The angel and the she-devil and…
Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture
Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture
Churchill the Playwright
This is a study of the work of Caryl Churchill who wrote Fen, Top Girls and Serious Money. Geraldine Cousin examines the development of Churchill's powerful style from her earliest work to the major plays
The moral sense of the majorities: Indecency and vigilance in Late-Victorian music halls
Although known as the 'Naughty Nineties', the last years of the nineteenth century are characterised by a succession of anti-liberal backlashes most notoriously including the Vizetelly prosecution of 1889 (principally involving Emile Zola's novels), Oscar Wilde's trials of 1895 (indirectly about homosexuality) and the pillorying of feminist reformers. Instead of becoming more sexually permissive, the English fin de siècle was in many respects dee…
The Independent Theatre Society's Revolutionary Scheme for an Uncommercial Theater
The original ancestor of the British fringe theater, the Independent Theatre Society, was conceived as an option to the literary, political, and economic homogeneity of the late-Victorian stage. It is in the first capacity-as a theater for modernist playwrights from Britain and the Continent--that the Independent Theatre Society is chiefly remembered, yet it may be in this capacity that its achievements are most limited. As an oppositional force …
Detecting the deceit of the motivated liar
John Gabriel Borkman
The Actress in Victorian Pornography
Decades before the theories of conditioned reflexes and behavior modification were expounded in England, moral reformers recognized that to control passions in the Skinnerian boxes of Victorian theatres passionate stimuli must be checked. The need to control passionate stimuli was a concern limited to a few, for only a few who understood the stimulants and the nature of the passions were willing to eradicate a socially sanctioned source of so muc…
The Independent Theatre Society's Revolutionary Scheme for an Uncommercial Theater
The original ancestor of the British fringe theater, the Independent Theatre Society, was conceived as an option to the literary, political, and economic homogeneity of the late-Victorian stage. It is in the first capacity-as a theater for modernist playwrights from Britain and the Continent--that the Independent Theatre Society is chiefly remembered, yet it may be in this capacity that its achievements are most limited. As an oppositional force …
Theatrical Antecedents of the Mall that Ate Downtown
Actresses as working women: Their social identity in Victorian culture
Using historical evidence and personal accounts, Davis examines the reality of conditions for òrdinary' actresses, their working environments, employment patterns, and the reasons why acting continued as a popular though insecure profession
Churchill the Playwright
This is a study of the work of Caryl Churchill who wrote Fen, Top Girls and Serious Money. Geraldine Cousin examines the development of Churchill's powerful style from her earliest work to the major plays
The moral sense of the majorities: Indecency and vigilance in Late-Victorian music halls
Although known as the 'Naughty Nineties', the last years of the nineteenth century are characterised by a succession of anti-liberal backlashes most notoriously including the Vizetelly prosecution of 1889 (principally involving Emile Zola's novels), Oscar Wilde's trials of 1895 (indirectly about homosexuality) and the pillorying of feminist reformers. Instead of becoming more sexually permissive, the English fin de siècle was in many respects dee…
Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture
Reading for Economic History
Except when scrutinizing TIAA-CREF reports or ciphering the discrepancy between annual merit increases and the rate of inflation, most theatre scholars probably avoid evidence of the economic and ignore its relevance to their careers. Perhaps in protest at the surfeit of economic data present in our everyday lives, we align with humanists who distrust the collection and employment of such data; yet, when we know we must refute an administrator's …
Dramatic Re-Visions: An Annotated Bibliography of Feminism and Theatre 1972-1988
Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture
Laborers of the Nineteenth-Century Theater: The Economies of Gender and Industrial Organization
In the purview of theater history, as on the theatrical stage itself, performers' and writers' command on attention is almost complete. Ancient Greek gave a word to its mask builders ( skeuopoio ), but apart from distinct vocabulary, history leaves few traces of theatrical laborers. A glance through any number of theatrical books, periodicals, bibliographies, biographical guides, and encyclopedias reveals the predominance of performers in the pub…
The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660-1700
Illustrations A note on styling, dates and editions used Preface Introduction 1. The arrival of the actress 2. Sex and violence: the exploitation of the actress in Restoration drama 3. The actress, the dramatist and comedy 4. Life overwhelming fiction: how actresses' own personalities affected their roles 5. Elizabeth Barry and the development of Restoration tragedy 6. The actress as dramatic prostitute/mistress 7. The angel and the she-devil and…
The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660-1700
Performing and the Real Thing in the Postmodern Museum
When artifacts are displayed, viewers' relationship to the real is particularly important. Whether the context is a museum such as Skansen (Stockholm's prototypical museum of agrarian architectural preservation) or a theatrical production such as David Belasco's installation of a Child's Restaurant (in 1912 for The Governor's Lady), the material authenticity within a logically illusionistic setting is key to the attraction. This simulacrum is so …
Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing Theater as If Gender and Race Matter . Ellen Donkin , Susan Clement Acting out: Feminist Performances . Lynda Hart , Peggy Phelan
The Rise of the English Actress
Between History and Event: Rehearsing Nuclear War Survival
Performance historian Davis opens a window onto the civil defense movement that was a mainstay of Western governments from 1949 until the collapse of the Eastern Bloc from 1989 to 1991. Civil defense activities included playing out many “as if” scenarios wherein a “time out of time” reality was created, something that NATO members referred to as the “scope of play” (portée du jeu) and the “play of decisions” (jou des décisions). These activities,…
Do You Believe in Fairies: The Hiss of Dramatic License
When Peter Pan asks audiences to affirm their belief in fairies in order to revive Tinker Bell, this can be interpreted as an affirmation of the willing suspension of disbelief thought to be an essential condition of theatrical spectating. However, closer analysis of the original 1904 production of Peter Pan, including its variation from conventional pantomime, reveals the intertext of two contemporaneous debates in ethnology: the idea that the l…
Operation Northwoods: The Pentagon's Scripts for Overthrowing Castro
Operation Northwoods: The Pentagon's Scripts for Overthrowing Castro
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy authorized Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop a plan for dealing with President Fidel Castro. The “Operation Northwoods” proposal is analyzed as a set of explicitly theatrical scenarios, scripting the pretext for invading a sovereign nation
Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense
The Performing Century
This book looks at modes of performance and forms of theatre in Nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland. On subjects as varied as the vogue for fairy plays to the representation of economics to the wor
The Cambridge companion to performance studies
Art (36 works) · History (27 works) · History (25 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Literature (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Political science (17 works) · Art history (16 works) · Aesthetics (14 works) · Law (13 works)