Dr Laura Higgins
Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Drama
School of Education, Humanities and Languages
Role
Laura did a BEd Hons in Drama at Saint Luke’s College (University of Exeter) and an MA in Theatre: Text and Production at the University of East Anglia. She completed her PhD at Royal Holloway University of London.
Before joining the Drama team at Oxford Brookes in 2013, Laura worked for seven years as an Associate Lecturer and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway University of London. She has also taught courses in Shakespeare: Text and Performance in the Drama Department of Kingston University and at Arcadia University, London.
Teaching and supervision
Courses
Modules taught
Undergraduate
- Texts in Performance
- Approaches to Performance
- British Theatre 1950 – Present
- Theatre and Theory: Modern and Postmodern
- Staging Riots, Resistance, and Power
- Final Production
Research
Laura’s research and teaching reflect her interest in the continual dialogue between the theatrical past and contemporary theatre practice. Her work draws on theories from cultural geography to explore the complex interactions between actor, text and space in performance. She has published on Shakespeare in contemporary production and is currently working on a monograph about the staging and significance of ghosts in drama from Shakespeare to present day.
Her research interests include:
- Theatre history and historiography
- Shakespeare in contemporary production
- Theatre and geography
- Performance spaces
- Ghosts in theatre: concepts and performance
Groups
Publications
Professional information
Memberships of professional bodies
Member of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA)
Conferences
- 'Opening up Spaces of Hope: Rethinking the Politics of Empowerment in Theatre'. Paper presented at Whither Political Theatre?, University of Cambridge, September 2014.
- '"the abstract and brief chronicles of the time": Redefining the History Play through Twenty-First century Drama'. Paper presented at Theatre and Stratification, IFTR, University of Warwick, July 2014.
- 'The "too too solid flesh" and the Body of the Ghost: The Role of Actors' Experiences in Interpreting the Perfromance of Spectrality'. Paper presented in the Theatre History and Historiography Working Group, TaPRA, University of Plymouth, September 2009.
- 'Placing the Memory, Remembering the Place: The Impact of Michael Boyd's Histories on Theatre Identity and Audience Experience'. Paper presented in the Theatre History and Historiography Working Group, IFTR, University of Lisbon, July 2009.
- Locating Herself; Finding her Voice: Reasserting the Queen's Narrative in Shakespeare's Richard II'. Paper presented at Place Writing and Voice, University of Plymouth, September 2008.
- 'Journeys of the King: Adapting Shakespeare's Richard II from Page to Satge to Screen'. Paper presented at Journeys Across Media, University of Reading, April 2008.
- 'Building the Nation: Constructing England on Stage in the Twenty-First Century'. Paper Presented in the Theatre Architecture Working Group, University of Prague, June 2007.
- 'In Front of the Scenes at the Museum: Reappraising Perfromance and Record at Shakespeare's Globe on Bankside'. Paper Presneted at Researching Cultural Spaces, Royal Hollway University of London and Queen mary University of London, June 2006.
- 'Translating Spaces: The Realization of the World of Richard II in Two Productions (John Barton 1973 and Trevor Nunn 2005). Paper presented at the British Graduate Shakespeare Conference, Shakespeare Institute, June 2006.
- 'Adventurers, Stars, and Dreamers: Screening Heroism in Hollywood'. Paper presented at the First International Conference on Popular Texts in English, University of Castilla-La Mancha, November 1998.