I’m giving a talk this evening as part of the Columbia University Seminar in 18th-Century European Culture. It’s titled “No longer effectuates agency priorities:” Defending the De-Funded Humanities.”
Abstract:
Launched in 2019, the open-access London Stage Database (LSDB) includes details about more than 52,000 theatrical performances recorded and advertised in England’s capitol between 1660 and 1800. The site is not only a reference resource, but also a media archeological experiment—a recovery of a digital project that became obsolete almost as soon as it was completed in 1978. The problems of precarity, sustainability, and collective memory work haunting the implementation of this project have always had their mirror image in its content, which illustrates the practices of revival, adaptation, and embodied repertoire that sustained British performance culture across a period of near-constant rupture and crisis. These themes have taken on a new urgency in recent weeks, however, as the Trump administration has gutted the federal research funding enterprise and waged war on our institutions of higher education. On April 4, my team’s NEH grant for “Extending the London Stage Database” was abruptly terminated, disrupting our plans to grow the dataset, develop new content and features, and shore up our technical infrastructure over the next two and a half years. Against these daunting headwinds, this talk will look to the eighteenth-century stage for insights that might help us defend, maintain, and build community around sites of shared intellectual and cultural production.
Handouts
Seminar attendees: If you’d like to follow along on your own device, here’s a copy of the slides, plus a more printer-friendly list of quotations and references.
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