People

This page includes biographical details of the many people that have been involved in the project.

They are organised alphabetically, with a descriptor following the name.

We thank all of you.

Nicola Baldwin (playwright) studied English Literature at UCL, followed by post-graduate diploma in film studies at PCL (University of Westminster) and short camera course at National Film School. She worked as a camerwoman and video director, with shorts screened at LFF, ICA, Whitechapel Gallery & dance-based installations at Place Theatre and Royal Festival Hall. She won the George Devine award for her first play Confetti with subsequent commissions/ productions at Royal Court, Manchester Royal Exchange, Sheffield Crucible, Unicorn, Last Kings Head and Bath Theatre Royal. Her Wellcome-funded science plays for Y Touring include The Gift, Cracked and Leap of Faith. In 2016 she took part in a Wellcome/Radio 4 science-drama initiative at Churchill College, Cambridge, and was commissioned to write Euston to Whitechapel, dramatising the neuroscience of brain injury. In 2018 she wrote Mrs X for Imperial College Science Festival, and six short films for Wellcome Genome Campus. Radio plays include Tony & Rose, Seven Scenes, Have Your Cake (series) and The Crisis of Wallis Simpson. For TV Nicola has written episodes for Where The Heart Is, Night And Day, London Bridge; single drama Proud (ITV), and adapted her stage play The Gift. She was Royal Court Writers Tutor, Associate Lecturer at Drama Centre/ Central St Martins, Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at University of Greenwich 2013-15 and is currently Research Fellow at the RLF. She is a co-director of Furious Theatre, a new writing company specialising in site-specific productions. We The Young Strong, about women in Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts was begun on attachment at NT Studio and had R&D at The Lowry in January 2018. As ‘Nicola Baldwin&Co’ she collaborated with Dr Elaine Cloutman-Green and Healthcare Scientists from various London hospitals on Nosocomial a verbatim science fiction/fact drama which had R&D performances at Camden People’s Theatre in September 2018. https://www.nicolabaldwin.eu/

Sally Blackburn-Daniels (academic and project respondent) is a Postgraduate Research Associate in English at the Open University. She has recently completed her PhD at the University of Liverpool on ‘”The Scholar’s Blotting Book” and the “Blotting Book Mind”: Stratigraphic Approaches to Interdisciplinary Reading and Writing in the Work of Vernon Lee’. She serves as Communications Officer for the International Vernon Lee Society (IVLS). Follow her on Twitter @drSallyBD and find her contact details at http://www.open.ac.uk/people/sbd63

Alison Brown (academic and project respondent) is Emeritus Professor of History at Royal Holloway University of London. She is an historian with interests in Renaissance political history and art and has written on Bernard Berenson (1865-1959), the art critic critic and Renaissance expert. Her details are at https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/alison-brown(0a4427f0-6845-4a15-bf24-ff76f15fd0a8).html

Carolyn Burdett (project lead and academic) is a Senior Lecturer in English and Victorian Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of two books on the South African writer, Olive Schreiner; co-editor of The Victorian Supernatural (CUP, 2004); and General Editor of the journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century https://www.19.bbk.ac.uk. She is completing a book, Forming Empathy: Psychology, Aesthetics, Ethics 1870-1920, from which this project draws. You can read more about her at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-staff/full-time-academic-staff/burdett

Shannon Draucker (academic and project respondent) is Assistant Professor of English at Siena College, USA. She is currently preparing for publication Sounding Bodies: Music and Physiology in Victorian Literature. Read more about her at https://shannondraucker.com and follow her on Twitter @sdraucker.

Hilary Fraser (academic) is the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She was a former Director of its Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, from which position she founded and launched its online journal, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century https://www.19.bbk.ac.uk in 2005. She has published extensively in the fields of Victorian art, literature and culture, and first began working on Vernon Lee three decades ago for her book The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (1992).  Her most recent book is Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century: Looking Like a Woman (CUP, 2014). She is currently working on an edition of Walter Pater’s The Renaissance for Oxford University Press’s Collected Works of Walter Pater and preparing a monograph on art writing, The Critic as Artist. Read more at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-staff/full-time-academic-staff/hilary-fraser

Matthew Longo (academic)is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Birkbeck, University of London. He has published extensively on the representation of bodies and their relation to perception. He researches how bodies shape perceptions, including touch, proprioception, space awareness and pain, and how body representation emerges in development and how, even in adults, it can be manipulated and altered through illusion. He is Director of Birkbeck’s Body Representation Laboratory. Find more at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/our-staff/matthew-longo

Rob Swain (academic, theatre director, and project lead) is Professor of Theatre Practice at Birkbeck, University of London, where he leads the MFA Theatre Directing, offering industry-recognised training for theatre directors. Alumni of the training include Lyndsey Turner, Olivier Award winner and associate director of the National Theatre; Sam Pritchard, associate director of the Royal Court Theatre; Justin Audibert, associate director of the RSC and artistic director of the Unicorn Theatre; and many associate directors of regional theatres and artistic directors of Arts Council England funded theatre companies. From 2001 to 2017 Rob was on the Executive Board of Drama UK, overseeing the professional accreditation of acting and technical training programmes at the UK’s drama schools. He has recently devised and led director-training programmes for the RSC and Shakespeare’s Globe. He is also a freelance theatre director. He was the artistic director of Harrogate Theatre, directing over twenty productions, many of which were ACE-funded national tours and co-productions, from Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and Shakespeare’s Macbeth to a newly commissioned adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s book, Truckers. In five years, audiences for the theatre’s work doubled and a completely new rural outreach programme across North Yorkshire was established. Before leading Harrogate Theatre, he was associate director of the New Vic Theatre in Staffordshire, commissioning and directing many new plays, twice winning the Mentorn Award for the best production of a new play in the Central TV area. He was associate director of the London Bubble, innovating ways of working with actor-musicians. As a freelance director he has directed at numerous regional theatres including the Octagon Bolton, Oldham Coliseum the Belgrade Coventry, and in Germany. He recently received ACE funding for the development of an original opera, Vice, based on Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. His book Directing: A Handbook for Emerging Theatre Directors is published by Methuen.

Penny Layden (actor) was Vernon Lee in the November 2018 ‘scratch’, ‘Experimenting in the Galleries: Performing with Vernon Lee’.  She has recently appeared as Ross in Macbeth and Britannia in My Country: A Work in Progress for Rufus Norris at the National Theatre. For more, see https://www.feastmanagement.co.uk/penny-layden

Anna Tierney (actor) played Kit Anstruther-Thomson in the November 2018 ‘scratch’, ‘Experimenting in the Galleries: Performing with Vernon Lee’ and tweets as @AnnaTierney. See more at https://www.mandy.com/actor/profile/anna-tierney