Toronto Eighteenth-Century Group (TECG) Lecture Series: Professor Fiona Ritchie

Please join us at 4:30 pm for conversation and light refreshments, and 5:00 pm sharp for the talk.

Talk Title: "Four Nights in Oxford in 1815: What the End of Dorothy Jordan’s Career Can Tell Us about Women and Regional Theatre"

This talk examines the four performances given by the *star actress* Dorothy Jordan in Oxford in August 1815. A consideration of the circumstances and rhetoric surrounding these performances sheds new light on Jordan’s career. Such an analysis also elucidates the distinct theatrical landscape of Oxford in the period and uncovers new information about other women connected with local performance culture. An exploration of this brief moment in Jordan’s biography opens up new avenues for understanding women’s contributions to regional theatre in the long eighteenth century.

About the Speaker

Fiona Ritchie is Associate Professor of English at McGill University. She is author of Shakespeare in the Theatre: Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble (Bloomsbury, 2022); Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2014); and co-editor, with Peter Sabor, of Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2012). Professor Ritchie is interested in questions of sociability, the role of emotions in the theatre, and provincial versus metropolitan performance culture, and is currently undertaking research on women and regional theatre in Britain in the long eighteenth century.