Research spotlight:
Citizen Scholarship, digital
engagement, and regional
theatre heritage
Professor Jo Robinson is a theatre historian who specialises in the history and practice of regional theatre and performance. She has particular interests in how digital technologies can be used to enhance heritage and community engagement.
Research overview
I am particularly interested in the relationships between performance, place, region and community, particularly where existing histories neglect the importance of local and regional practices. My research also focuses on the ways in which the methods that we use to research and share those stories can shape our knowledge, which has led to key innovations in research practice, from early digital collaborations with geography colleagues to map and explore mid-nineteenth-century performance culture in Nottingham, to my current work with communities of citizen scholars in the city to co-research and co-curate the history of the Theatre Royal and other local cultural institutions. My focus on relationships between performance and audience has also led me to work with different regional creative industry partners.
Research projects
Our Theatre Royal Nottingham
Theatre Royal heritage open day © Ian Webster
In 2017-19, Professor Robinson collaborated with the Theatre Royal Nottingham on a Heritage Lottery Fund project to enhance the theatre's heritage managment and preservation practices.
Find out more about the project
Professor Robinson's research expertise in volunteer and digital engagement enabled the theatre to bring its history to the wider public through mobilising a team of volunteer 'citizen scholars', who catalogued the theatre's analogue collections and co-created a freely accessible digital theatre archive.
Listen to Professor Robinson talk about her research on the Theatre Royal, what the venue can tell us about regional theatre history, and how her expertise in digital engagement has impacted the development of the Theatre Royal digital archive:
Find out more about the project
Explore the digital archive
Citizen Scholarship in Nottingham
Citizen scholars at work © Ian Webster
Following the success of the 'Our Theatre Royal' project, Professor Robinson secured AHRC Follow-On funding in 2017 to develop her model of Citizen Scholarship further and roll it out across the Nottinghamshire region.
Read more about the project
The aim of this project is to help literary, cultural and heritage organisations in Nottingham and the wider region develop ways to share ownership of their heritage stories through training their own teams of citizen scholars and developing digital tools for heritage engagement. Professor Robinson is currently working with partners across the city and region, including Nottingham City Council, Bromley House Library, Derby Theatre, and Southwell Workhouse.
Find out more about Citizen Scholarship
Integrated Immersive Inclusiveness
Soonchild by Red Earth Theatre © Robert Day
Professor Robinson also works on contemporary regional theatre and using digital technologies to make theatre more inclusive for diverse audiences.
Find out more about the project
In this AHRC- and EPSRC-funded project, Professor Robinson collaborated with Red Earth Theatre Company and specialists from Computer Science and Modern Languages at UoN to trial immersive technologies in the creation of inclusive and integrated theatre for audiences across the deaf spectrum.
Listen to Professor Robinson talk about the work she has done with Red Earth Theatre company:
Find out more about the project
Making Accessibility Accessible
Soonchild by Red Earth Theatre © Robert Day
This AHRC-funded project builds on 'Integrated Immersive Inclusiveness' and aims to share immersive technologies with theatre companies across the UK.
Read more more about the project
The 'Integrated Immersive Inclusiveness' project successfully developed, trialled and shared prototype approaches to immersive captioning in short extracts of performance. In this follow-on project, Professor Robinson and her team aim to embed immersive captions in the context of full touring productions, and share this new technology with touring theatre companies and deaf audiences across the UK.
Find out more about the project
Changing Communities
This project focused on theatre and community in the East Midlands from 1973, the year in which both Nottingham Playhouse's Theatre in Education Company Roundabout and the Perspectives Theatre Company (now New Perspectives) were founded in the region.
Read more about the project
The project mapped and analysed the complex interrelationships between community, place, repertoire, funding and engagement in these theatre companies. This research fed into Professor Robinson's monograph on Theatre & the Rural (Palgrave, 2016) and an exhibition, 'Local Acts: Theatre and Communities in the East Midlands', at the Lakeside Arts Centre in 2015.
Theatre Historiography
Theatre Royal posters © Ian Webster
Professor Robinson's research on theatre history and historiography reflects on the methods of theatre history and the modes of its writing. She questions in particular why less attention has been paid to regional, rather than established, theatre histories.
Read more about this work
Professor Robinson has co-edited two key collections in this field with Professor Clare Cochrane: Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth (Palgrave, 2015) and The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Listen to Professor Robinson talk about the ideas that underpin The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography:
Project funding
These projects were made possible through funding from:
Back to top