Vincent A. De Luca Lecture | "Disability and the Great Tragedian: Kemble, Kean, and Richard III" with Professor Essaka Joshua (University of Notre Dame)

The 2026 Vincent A. De Luca Lecture
Professor Essaka Joshua, University of Notre Dame
"Disability and the Great Tragedian: Kemble, Kean, and Richard III"

From its earliest performances, actors selected the role of Richard III to accommodate bodies and voices regarded as aesthetically problematic, integrating their own bodily and vocal particularities into their acting styles. This talk delves into the Romantic-era performance history of Richard III, examining key moments in which drama intervenes in the history of disability, and in which disability shapes drama. The work is forthcoming in An Alternative History of Shakespearean Acting: Contexts, Practices and Cultural Authority, ed. Sally Barnden, Emer McHugh, and Miranda Fay Thomas Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury Academic.

Essaka Joshua, PhD, FSA, specializes in the literary and cultural perceptions of disability of the British Romantic and Victorian periods. Joshua is the author of three monographs: Physical Disability in British Romantic Literature(Cambridge University Press, 2020), The Romantics and the May Day Tradition (Ashgate, 2007), and Pygmalion and Galatea: The History of a Narrative in English Literature (Ashgate, 2001). Her latest book, Disability and the Gothic: The Nineteenth Century, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2026. Professor Joshua is currently working on a monograph on disability in Romantic Theatre and is the general editor of the four-volume series, The Oxford Handbooks of Disability and Literatures in English.