Office: 351 EPB
  Phone: 319-335-0475
  E-Mail: Judith-Pascoe@uiowa.edu

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Judith Pascoe

Eighteenth-Century Novel, Romantic Literature and Culture, Collecting History and Theory, Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Theatre

My current research focuses on Sarah Siddons's voice and the acoustic transformation of the romantic theatre.  Siddons, the most celebrated actor of the romantic period, performed on stage at a unique moment in theatre history when enlarged theatre buildings and rising anxiety about the fragility of actors' voices drew attention to the most ephemeral feature of dramatic performance. Decades in advance of electronic sound recording technology, Siddons's fans sought ways to preserve her voice for future generations.  I have been collecting romantic-era recording efforts—which range from descriptive narratives to systems of symbols—as a means of re-animating Siddons's lavishly praised vocal powers, but also as a way of understanding why the romantic theatre repertoire, an odd mélange of warmed-over classics and misguided Shakespeare abridgements, played such a key role in the romantic literary imagination.

My first book, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Cornell, 1997), examines the ways in which theatrical modes of self-representation came to permeate literary life in the 1790s.  My second book, The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and  Curious History of Romantic Collectors (Cornell, 2006) explores the connections between a romantic ethos of transcendence and the popularization of collecting. I have also edited Mary Robinson: Selected Poems (Broadview, 2000), and have written about teaching Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (Hudson Review, summer 2003) and about miniature book collecting (American Scholar, summer 2006). I teach classes on romantic literature, on collecting history and theory, and on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century drama.