Helen Dallas

Thesis Title: The Life and Death of Dramatic Character in the Romantic Period, 1779-1839

Supervisor: David F. Taylor

Doctoral research

My thesis argues that a new model of dramatic character emerged in the late eighteenth century, when audiences were confronted for the first time with the possibility that a character could 'die' with a beloved actor. I examine how Romantic culture anticipated and attempted to combat such loss across textual, visual, and material forms, and the transformative effect this had: the Romantic period, I contend, marked a shift in the relationship between theatre and memory. My work encompasses major canonical Romantic writers, including prominently Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, William Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb, alongside non-canonical writers, particularly women, such as Elizabeth Inchbald, Joanna Baillie, and Marie Thérèse De Camp. 

Publications

‘Theatre, Anti-Theatricality and Anti-Blackness in Romantic Criticism’, forthcoming in Romanticism, October 2024

Other work

I am the Performance Research Hub Co-ordinator in the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities

I was a co-convenor of the TORCH Reimagining Performance Network, and co-presenter of Practice Makes... the Oxford Reimagining Performance Podcast.

I was the recipient of the Richard Hillary Prize for creative writing in 2024

I have reviewed theatre for the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies's Criticks Blog, e.g

Before coming to Oxford, I did my undergraduate degree in English at Christ's College, University of Cambridge, and my MA in Text and Performance at Birkbeck, University of London and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I remain interested in making theatre as well as researching it. 

I was an Ashmolean Junior Teaching Fellow 2022-23, and also have experience teaching literature of the long eighteenth-century as well as drama up to the present.