Dr Clare Wright researches medieval drama and performance culture, focusing especially on questions of space, place and embodiment, and medieval performance paradigms and practices. She also has interests in cross-disciplinary practice-as-research, exploring collaborations between pre-modern scholars and contemporary theatre and creative practitioners. She has written articles and essays for Theatre Survey, Shakespeare Bulletin, Medieval English Theatre, The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, The Edinburgh History of Distributed Cognition, Oxford Bibliographies and Bloomsbury Medieval Studies, and has designed and led public performance workshops and events in both Canterbury and London.
Clare holds an MA (Hons) in English Literature and Philosophy from the University of Glasgow, an MA (with distinction) in Medieval English and an AHRC-funded PhD, both from the University of Nottingham.
Clare has been a member of the Medieval English Theatre Society since 2007 and was Chair of the Society 2017-2019. She is a member of the editorial board for the journal ROMARD, is a council member for the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society and
is the founder member of the Premodern Performance Cultures Network, as well as a member of the Society for the Study of Medieval Language and Literature and the New Chaucer Society, and a fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Though predominantly teaching medieval and early modern literature and drama, both at UG and PG level, Clare also has experience of teaching a broad range of literatures from the early medieval period through to the twenty-first century and across genres, forms and disciplines, including theatre and performance studies and literary theory.
Research interests
Clare's research interests include:
Early drama of the British Isles
Pre-modern European performance culture and practices (including liturgy, piety and devotion; civic and royal pageantry; games; performance techniques and methods; production contexts; cultural contexts for performance)
Medieval tournament culture and performance
Medieval courtly literature and culture
Medieval Women’s Literature and literary cultures
Intersections between medieval scholarship and contemporary creative arts
Space, place and site-specificity
The body and the senses; bodily experience; embodied cognition; distributed cognition; kinaesthetic empathy
Clare’s present research focuses on tournament culture in the late-medieval and early Tudor period, on the interplay between the different kinds of performance events that constituted a ‘tournament’ (e.g. jousts, plays, pageants, disguisings, feasts, knighting ceremonies, dances, etc), their construction and occupation of space, and the craftspeople and designers created these extravagant, spectacular events.
Her attention is currently devoted to Henry VIII’s Great Westminster Tournament of 1511. Combining methodologies and theories drawn predominantly from the fields of history and performance studies, the project considers the ‘theatrical’, material, embodied and spatial aspects of the tournament. It also explores the practical and logistical concerns of ‘staging’ such an extended, complex, elaborate and important event, aiming to develop a detailed understanding of the role of this tournament in the construction of Henry’s identity as king, the idea of England as a nation in relation to its European neighbours, and the importance of embodied performance and practice in both these processes.
Teaching
Stage 1
ENGL4000 Changing Literatures from Chaucer to the Contemporary
Stage 2
ENGL5001 Shakespeare, Before and After
Stage 3
ENGL6021 Magic, Marvels and Monsters in Medieval Literature
ENGL6011 A Woman’s Tale: Writing Female Identity and Experience in Medieval Europe
PGT
MEMS7003 Material Approaches to Modernity
MEMS7005 Premodern Race: Selfhood, Politics and Culture
MEMS7006 Sacred Arts: Death and Doom in the Premodern World
Supervision
Clare welcomes proposals from students interested in any aspect of medieval and Tudor drama, European performance culture, Middle English and Older Scots literature, and interdisciplinary, cross-period or creative projects.
Current or completed PhD projects supervised include:
Depictions of race in Arthurian romance
Chivalry and the Westminster Tournament
Continental devotional book production for the English market in the fifteenth century
Emotion, materiality and Henrician epistolary culture
Folklore, women and Early Modern drama
The language of violence in Revenge Dram
·Fear in Romanesque sculpture
Professional
Chair 2016-2019, Medieval English Theatre Society
Academic Consultant, ‘Before Shakespeare: The Beginnings of London Commercial Theatre, 1565-1595’ project, led by Dr Andy Kesson at Roehampton (AHRC-Funded).
