Awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant

£6346 awarded to carry out archival work in Italy betweeen July 2013 and January 2013 for a project entitled 'Female Theatregoers in Italy's Long Nineteenth Century'. The study, which will become my second monograph, intends to examine female performance and its consumption in Italy as mediated through reviews in theatre journals and women’s journals, fan letters and diaries. It seeks to correct an historiographical oversight by identifying and describing a gendered public sphere in which women operated as critical cultural consumers of the theatre performances they attended thereby creating a female critical community with its own lexicon of cultural criticism by and for women. Through archival research the study draws upon non-fiction accounts and realist fiction by female theatregoers to chart this development, linking it to the rise of the movement for female emancipation in Italy in the 1890s and the emergence of women writers on the literary scene since the 1870s.