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Julia Fawcett, "Movable Londons: Performance and the Modern City" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
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Marshall Po
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Julia Fawcett about her book titled Movable London's Performance and the Modern City, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2025. This book is obviously subtitled the Modern City. But for those of us who know London well, we know that that actually takes us back pretty far back in time, because we generally think about the modern city being started when the Great Fire of London in 1666 pretty much makes it mandatory. A whole lot of things burn down and so many rebuilding efforts have to start. And of course, with anything, there's all sorts of debates about what that rebuilding should look like. And in the meantime, people have to figure out how to live in the city. And that's a pretty complicated thing at any point, especially in a moment like this.
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Dr. Julia Fawcett
And.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And that's what this book helps us understand, is how we can make sense of this moment now, how people at the time made sense of this and what this had to do with other things happening in the city in this restoration moment, for example, theatre that the city was and is famous for. So, clearly a lot to discuss here. Julia, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Julia Fawcett
Thank you so much, Miranda. I'm excited to be here.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Julia Fawcett
Yeah. So I am a professor in the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, and I've always been interested in the intersections between theater history and performance studies. So thinking about all of the things about the theater that aren't exactly written down in a script. And so this book was a way of thinking through that. And it began as a book about personal space. I had emigrated to Toronto for my first job, and torohontonians, they have very clear rules, I found, about how to use personal space and how to use public space on the sidewalk. They would shout rules at me all the time when I was biking or when I was walking. And so I kind of started to think about differences between cities and between nation, about kind of how people were permitted or how people were invited to use public space and all the sort of unspoken rules around that. So I began with what became my second chapter on how women navigated their personal space in the city where ideas of public space and personal space had shifted so much. And. And I thought that I would do this. I would. It would allow me. Thinking about personal space, would kind of allow me to think about how people without property claimed their space in the city without, you know, having to purchase it. But I realized pretty quickly that personal space, too, was tied to property, and that people with more money and power in a society somehow managed to take up more space everywhere. And so I realized that that maybe wasn't the metric that I thought it was. And around the same time that I sort of was realizing this, I also moved to California to take up my job at UC Berkeley. And living in the Bay Area, there's a kind of ongoing debate about a housing crisis here and the price of living in the Bay Area. And there's a Lot of unhoused people who have sort of been priced out of real estate here. So I started to kind of think about other housing crises in history, or rather this particular housing crisis happening just after the Great Fire as being maybe one way to think about our own situation in the Bay Area. And I think it's obviously not limited to the Bay Area. There are housing crises in cities around the country and around the world too. So the book was kind of a way of thinking through some of that, you know, by thinking about the historical questions.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a very helpful introduction to our conversation. And in fact, we've kind of therefore already covered a bunch of the key words in the title. Obviously I mentioned modern city. You've talked a bit there about kind of performance. What about movable? How is this both an argument and a method in your book?
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Dr. Julia Fawcett
Yeah, so movable. The word movable means a few things in the book. First of all, it means movable property. So movable property as opposed to real property or real estate. Right. Movable property is any kind of property that isn't tied to land, things that you can move around and that you can trade. And it was becoming more important at this time in England with the gradual move from an agricultural to a trade based economy. So you have the beginnings of capitalism and of globalization at this time. The bank of England was founded in 1694, which is kind of often seen as like an important milestone in this, in this move to capitalism. And so wealth became based not on owning land, you know, these static properties that couldn't be moved, but on circulation. How well you could circulate your products or laborers or your money around the city and around the globe. So that's one of the things that movable means. But also, as I, as I've sort of already alluded to, this movement of property around the globe also meant moving people around the globe because you need to move like laborers from one of your kind of one of England's imperial properties to another. So people are moving all around the world and also all around the city. And, and a large percentage of those people who were moving were moving because they were forced to move. They were enslaved people or refugees from England's expanding empire. They're not as visible in the written documents that we have from this period because they were moving. So they didn't have the luxury of saving diaries or papers or family heirlooms. And so my idea was that focusing on movement could help me to think more about these people and how they were moving through, but also thinking about and influencing the city. And then that brings up the obvious problem of how I could find evidence for the lives that these people were living. And so this is where the other meaning of movable comes in. Because another thing that's happening at this moment in the theater is that in England, there was the introduction of movable scenery for the first time into the public theaters. So movable scenery just means they. You know, during. During Shakespeare's day, for instance, which we might all be familiar with, you had one backdrop in, for instance, the Globe Theater. And that was the backdrop for all of the performances at this time. They borrowed some technology from France and Italy and from the English court theaters. That allowed them to have painted flats that they could bring on and off the stage through, moving them on grooves through grooves on the floor. So they could change the scenes really quickly. And people have sort of thought about this as a way of staging this grand empire. Offering these grand perspectives on these exoticized locations. But that kind of exotic scenery only actually worked. And the perspective scenery only actually worked if you were seated perfectly still In a very particular part of the auditorium. The minute that you moved to the right or to the left, the perspective would. The illusion of the perspective would kind of get messed up. And I was interested in that. In that messing up. So I started to look at how these changeable scenes or movable scenes were used in comedy and how comedy was interested in those imperfections. And so. So I started to think about the ways that those imperfections included not only imperfections in the scenic illusions, but also in the way that bodies moving across the stage interrupted those scenic illusions. Right, because an actor on the four stage would look like they were the right scale for the scenery. But as soon as they moved to the back part of the stage, the scale would be messed up. And, of course, I just mentioned actors, but there were a lot of other bodies moving around the stage as well, including stagehands, including actors who were kind of serving as extras, who were often dressed as servants, kind of standing in the background. And so I started to focus not just on the scenery and not on the scenery when it was still, but on its movement and all of the movement around it. As a way of kind of conceptualizing the city as this place of shifting scenery and shifting spaces and shifting bodies. So it was a way of understanding kind of all the people moving within the city who aren't visible. When we think about the perspective drawings or the plans, the urban plans that people like Christopher Wren put forth, but who were, of course, very present and undeniably shaping how these plans were realized and if these plans were realized.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay. So there's a lot of useful things there that we can keep drawing on. And obviously the London theatre scene, as you've been describing, is key for these definitions of movable and uses of it. Is there anything else we need to understand about why you've chosen to look at these questions of space and moving through the London theatre scene?
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Dr. Julia Fawcett
I mean, I think that the London theatre scene at this moment is. Is. It's in a very radical moment. There are radical changes happening. And in part this is coming out of, you know, the interregnum. The theaters were outlawed for, you know, under. Under Cromwell. And so there was this real break in access to public theaters. And a lot of the old buildings were torn down. And then when Charles II was restored, he brought the theater back with him, but it was very changed. And so people have looked a lot at, for instance, the way that this was a moment when actresses were on stage for the first time, when women's roles were played by women instead of by young boys. That's gotten a lot of attention. But I think another radical shift is this bringing of the scenery, the movable scenery to the public stage when before it was only available in the court theaters. And I think that's gotten less attention. But I think it. It was arguably as influential and as important in terms of the lasting effects on the theater and people's experience of the theater as the introduction of women onto the stage.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely worth highlighting as a key part of very much how we still experience theater now. So getting into some of these plays that we examine and sort of how they're related to these questions about space and kind of who gets to. Obviously, I think we do often think about, as you mentioned earlier, right. Kind of the posh people take up the most space in terms of owning of property and also taking up space like walking down the sidewalk and things like that. That tends to be who we focus on. But of course, the posh people need servants running around before them, after them, around them, to kind of make all of this access possible. And that's maybe a skill set of navigation or kind of knowledge of how things go together that we don't necessarily focus on. And yet you have some great examples in the book of plays put on at this point that really do make servants knowledge of kind of how to get around and how things work together quite visible. So how is this being shown in these plays? And why was this relevant to London audiences? In this moment?
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Dr. Julia Fawcett
Yeah. Well, I'll start with kind of what's happening historically at this moment in terms of the class shift and what that might have to do with the presence of servants in London. Because this was something that was changing hugely at this time, in part in the aftermath of the English Civil wars and also part of those longer economic changes like this shift from an agricultural to a mercantile economy and the Enclosure Acts. And through those changes, a lot of people were displaced. And so many of them ended up. They were displaced from the agriculture work that they had been doing. And so they ended up moving to the city to try to find work there. So they became a bigger part of London life. And then at the same time you have the rise of the bourgeoisie. So people who are not, you know, who are not born into these aristocratic families, who don't have aristocratic names and so kind of have to prefer form and prove their, their wealth or their status. And one of the ways that they performed this or proved it is that they had this entourage of servants. So servants were becoming more and more an important part of London life. And at the same time they're becoming a bigger part of plays. So servants had always been characters in plays in England. But at this time, a lot of people have noted that they start to have more agency, they start to have more relevance to the plot, they start interacting with the upper class characters in the plots even more. And so they start to be a bigger presence on stage. But then at the same time, even those who weren't performers, who weren't expressly playing servants, were familiar with servants lives for a number of reasons. Actors were precarious. The plague of 1665 shut the theaters down for several months. And there was always the threat that it was going to do this again. And so they were always kind of one plague epidemic away from being out of work. But one thing they did to confront that precarity was to be sponsored by an aristocrat. At this time, it was either the duke or the king, either King Charles or the Duke, James Charles, brother. And so to signal that they were thought to signal that they were part of the, you know, sponsored by these aristocrats. And they were sort of thought of as servants in the king's or the duke's household, and therefore were issued livery, for instance, and called, you know, the king's servants or the Duke's servants. And so there was a lot of overlap actually between, you know, the, the, the groups of people who were brought to the city to be servants and the groups of people who became actors. And then at the same time, also you have stagehands who have a similar kind of skill set as servants. And so they're becoming, because of the movable scenery, becoming more a part of the show, the stage hands are becoming more important as well. So there's all sorts of overlaps between these kind of classes of workers in the theaters at the time.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is really interesting to understand, especially kind of why it's happening in this moment. So thank you for explaining that to us. Moving then to something you mentioned briefly earlier on in your introduction, about the ways in which space and kind of how people move through space has a gendered element. What did that kind of. How did that actually show itself? What did that do in terms of changing people's behavior of moving through both private and public areas? And what were the sorts of things that kind of influenced the extent to which people were like, oh, I guess I should do this now, or oh, not do this now?
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Dr. Julia Fawcett
Yeah, I mean, this is, this is, this is sort of, as you, as you point out, this was sort of the impetus for the book that then became one chapter of the book, the second chapter of the book, which is about women and how they navigated public space and specifically how they claimed personal space as they moved through the city. And it focuses on two really important changes to how space was utilized at this time. So one is there were changes to rape laws at this time, and it became primarily out of case law, but. But became really important that before this time, rape was considered a property crime, and the victim was not the woman who was assaulted, but the husband or the father who was thought to own that woman. And then, you know, his, his property was destroyed when. When. When she was assaulted. And at this time, that was beginning to change, and rape started to be classified as a sexual crime. So that women, or at least, and this is an important, at least middle and upper class women, white women, were thought to have property in their own bodies for the first time. So this sounds like a great move forward for feminism, but actually what it actually meant was that women's actions and clothing and movements and whereabouts started to be scrutinized because there was this idea that, well, if you're in charge of your body and that body is assaulted or raped, then that is somehow, you know, did you somehow invite this rape? Did you somehow cause it? And so, you know, this is a story that is very familiar to us today, unfortunately. But what this meant is that you started to have, in the transcripts of. Of court testimony from this time, you started to have really elaborate descriptions of women's movements and gestures and actions and how they performed their consent or maybe failed to perform their consent. So that was one thing that was happening. And then at the same time, as I mentioned, women are on stage for the first time. So what is important about this is that you, like, as these debates are happening in the law, you also have a place where you can go and, like, scrutinize women's movements on stage. And a popular formula in the plays at the time was to set a chaste woman beside a sort of promiscuous woman in the plot of the play. And this was so popular that there were actresses who were sort of typecast in these roles. So Anne Brace Girdle often played the chaste woman, and Elizabeth Barry often played the promiscuous woman. And you could set them side by side and kind of compare their actions, and then you would know what it meant to be a chaste woman versus a promiscuous woman. One of the people who use this formula a lot, but who also reversed it and questioned it was Aphra Behn, who was the first woman to make a living writing for the stage. And what's interesting about Aphra Behn's plays also is that she included more elaborate stage directions than were typical at the time. So we can actually, you know, read the scripts and through reading the stage directions that are part of that, trace how women moved, or at least how they were supposed to move, how the script directed their movements across the stage. And of course, you know, as you might expect, then, the stage directions often bore a striking resemblance to the court documents that were describing movements, the movements of women through the streets. When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together, use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites, and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com.
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Marshall Po
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Dr. Julia Fawcett
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera.
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Dr. Julia Fawcett
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Dr. Julia Fawcett
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Dr. Julia Fawcett
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
3 month plan $15 per month equivalent required New customer offer first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com hmm, this is really interesting to kind of see how this is all being kind of played out in both senses of the word in real time. Is there anything further, though, we want to discuss about the caveat you made about some of this applying much more to different classes of women and not equally to all?
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Dr. Julia Fawcett
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is a really important thing to point out because of course I said that women are being given or are sort of claiming property in their own bodies, but this didn't apply to enslaved women who are still regarded property and who were, I think, very visible and part of London life at this time. And it applied sort of less so also to servants and lower class women who had less access to personal space than upper class women. Interestingly, at this time there are some instances of lower class women or servant women accusing upper class men, usually their employers, of rape in court. So that did happen and they did have that sort of recourse. But as you might expect, it was often unsuccessful. And Ben kind of signals these inequalities and inequities in the complex ways that her plays kind of hint at slavery and enslaved women. There's often there are these hints, I think, especially in the Rover, for instance, that after a man is rebuffed by a white woman, he will attack an upper class white woman, he will attack a lower class or particularly an enslaved woman, and that these are people who have less legal recourse to defend themselves. And so Ben doesn't ever address that, you know, Head on. But there's always these hints that, like, yeah, what happens when. When these men who are sort of like sexually charged get outsmarted or rebuffed by the characters in Ben's plays? You know, who does that leave up for victimization? And I think that's a really disturbing and under discussed aspect of Ben's plays.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely worth highlighting. Moving on, however, though, we could of course talk about that chapter probably for a very long time, but of course there are many other aspects of the book. So let's talk about kind of where else we're seeing these sorts of stage technologies in London at this point. Is it just in the theatre itself?
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Dr. Julia Fawcett
And one of my chapters explores a kind of interesting and unexpected juxtaposition between dissenters who were sort of famously anti theatrical, and theaters themselves. Because in fact, they were often. Dissenters were often living in the same neighborhoods where the theaters were built, and they were often using theatrical technologies to escape this group of laws. That's kind of a shortcut name for it is the Clarendon Code, which basically made it illegal for dissenters to worship in the way that they wanted to worship, but also in particular to gather in any kind of large space together. And so what this meant is that of course, dissenters didn't stop gathering or stop worshipping. What they did was that they did it in sort of tricked out, like warehouses or other sort of hidden buildings that they tricked out with all of these technologies that could kind of conceal what was happening there if the authorities happened to wander by. And so there was a lot of these technologies were very similar to the technologies that were being used on the stage to shift scenes. They had trapdoors, they had scenes or doors or flats that would close at the blink of an eye. So that if the authorities came by trying to enforce the Clarendon Code, they could be concealed immediately. There's kind of a larger history here, which is that partly the dissenters were. Were borrowing these technologies not maybe directly from the theaters, but by way of Catholic congregations who had been using similar technologies for many years to evade authorities from preventing them from worshiping. But this is, you know, I think one of the things that's so interesting here is that the dissenters kind of obliquely acknowledge their debt to the theater or their similarities to the theater. And then of course, the theater itself picks up on this. And there are all sorts of plays where dissenters are being compared to the very performers who they, through all of their antitheatrical diatribes, are trying to Insult and trying to shut down.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, this was really interesting to read about. I mean, it's not just kind of, oh, we have a painted thing here that can be moved easily, like as you said, trapdoors.
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Dr. Julia Fawcett
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
There's a lot of very direct similarities. So direct that of course, it's not just you saying it. As you mentioned.
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Dr. Julia Fawcett
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
The communities at the time were like, oh, hey, look over there.
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Dr. Julia Fawcett
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Which is really quite interesting to see, especially as this population is changing kind of norms of who's allowed to do what is changing. As we've been discussing passing also, who's in London is changing too. So we're getting not just kind of lots of people moving in and out, but like large scale immigration from particular places, colonised places. For example, you discuss in the book large populations of Irish people are turning up in London. So how does this get reflected on the London stage?
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Dr. Julia Fawcett
Yeah, I mean, in a couple of ways. One sort of explicitly in the. In the scripts themselves. So one of the things that I explore in the fourth chapter of the book is the figure of the stage Irishman. And the stage Irishman was a stock character that went back. I mean, you can find them in Shakespeare's day and before. But what's interesting about this period is that you have the plays of George Farquhar, which many of them had stage Irishman in them and were kind of playing with the figure of the stage Irishman. Interesting ways. But I think why I focus on George Farquhar is he is actually the first playwright to pen the lines of stage Irishman, who is himself an Irish person. He emigrated from London or from Ireland to London, maybe just before, or maybe as he was writing his first play. And so he is kind of picking up on this trend of Irish immigration to London and kind of thinking through what that means in his plays and particularly like what it means for the English population. Because the other thing you have at this time is the first kind of interest in population science. And England became very worried, in part because of the plague, but also because of wanting to kind of populate their armies with people to. To invade other nations and help their kind of colonialist projects. They became very interested in population decline and worried about population decline. And so there were all of these schemes afoot to bring Irish women to London or send English women to Ireland in order to basically repopulate the English population, you know, using sort of this, you know, using the Irish population. So that was happening and Farquhar is really interested in that. But of course, at the same time, There are a number of Irish immigrants coming to London. In part because London is experiencing extreme labor shortages. Because they need to rebuild all of these buildings after the Great Fire. And so many people had moved out because of the fire and the plague. So they really. They need laborers. At the same time, people in Ireland are being displaced from their homes by English colonialism. And so they move to England and to London in particular. And many of them find work as construction workers rebuilding the city of London. And so my hypothesis, I guess, is. How I'll put it, is that some of these Irish immigrants also found work not only in rebuilding the buildings in London, but in constructing the sets of the stage, constructing these new, more elaborate theaters that were being built during this time. It's, you know, a similar skill set. And I think it's, you know, very possible that many of the people who were doing this work and who were acting as stagehands and set builders and things like that in the theaters were Irish immigrants. I don't have any hard evidence for that. Because, of course, like, many of the people doing this work were day laborers. And there are, you know, pretty scant records of who these people were. But I think it's pretty likely that many of them were Irish. Irish immigrants.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I mean, that does seem like a pretty plausible hypothesis. So thank you for explaining that to us. If we're talking, then, about lots of different groups. We've mentioned different religious groups. We've mentioned class. We're talking about immigration. That's a lot of mixes in a way that we might think about being termed as cosmopolitan. Who, however, got to claim being cosmopolitan in London?
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Dr. Julia Fawcett
Yeah, that's a great question. Because like so many things, it's really changing at this moment. In part because of all of these other economic changes that I've been talking about, right. With the. With the advent of. Or the move towards a mercantile economy. And the value. You know, the emphasizing the value of circulating goods and products and money. And then also with the beginnings of English imperialism, the English started to value knowledge of other places and peoples which hadn't been kind of on their radar before. And so a great example of this, or kind of a way of pinpointing this is There's a famous Mr. Spectator essay. Where Mr. Spectator goes to the Royal Exchange and he talks about that. You know, what makes him feel the most like a Londoner is when he goes to the Royal Exchange and he sees all of these people and products from other places. And he can kind of blend into them. And so, you know, what's interesting about that. Right. Is that it seems kind of oxymoronic that what makes him feel most English is being able to blend into all of these people that he defines as non English. But I think what's so key about that is that this idea of cosmopolitanism and of knowledge of other places and peoples is suddenly becoming valued in England in a way that it hadn't been before. But, you know, what's so ironic about that, of course, is that the people who had the most knowledge of other places and other people outside of England were those who had come from other places. So I talked a little bit about Irish immigrants, but also one of the most visible populations of these people were enslaved Africans who had been captured and who had traveled further than many other people in arriving in London. And so there was this kind of both admiration for the knowledge that enslaved Africans held about geographical, you know, areas beyond England and beyond London. There was this, you know, admiration for their geographical knowledge and cultural knowledge at the same time that the English wanted to claim that geographical and cultural knowledge for their own. So they, you know, so they really downplayed the knowledge that these enslaved Africans had in order to claim it as their own. So there was this, like, you know, push and pull between English people wanting to claim cosmopolitanism. But the way that they claimed their own cosmopolitanism was to appropriate the knowledge of these other people who they were enslaving and claiming mastery over.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Huh. That is interesting to see how those things are getting intertwined, at least in these people's minds. What does this mean, if anything, for places beyond London? I mean, is this a London only thing? Do we see this influencing other parts of the UK or even areas beyond the UK borders at this point?
- [38:29]
Dr. Julia Fawcett
Yeah, that's a really good question, because I think, you know, one of the things that I think one of the drawbacks, I guess, to. Or potential drawbacks to focusing on London, right, is London is the city that has been studied very often. And I think, you know, there's a Eurocentrism in that. Right. And I think so. One of the things that I wanted to do in this book was to say, you know, okay, yes, like, London is an important European city. But also, let's not forget that all of these people who are not from London originally and who are not even from Europe originally are actually influencing the way that London is. Is built and is imagined and is perceived. So that was part of what I wanted to do. But then there's also. So there's an inward movement, right, of all of these. These people influencing London itself. But then there's also an outward movement where, you know, this, the, the rebuilding of London after the great fire is also coinciding with the beginnings of English imperialism the world. And so England is establishing colonies at this time in the Caribbean in North America, or in what now is the United States in the Indian subcontinent. And as they're doing this, they're taking the urban plans that were never quite realized in London, and they're trying to just plop them down in all of these colonies that they're establishing. And so you have these cities growing up in these places that are kind of not at all suited to the London grid plan, that are taking on this grid plan. So the urban planning of London here is fanning outward around the world and is influencing all of these other cities, like Kingston, Jamaica, and Charleston, South Carolina, and like Mumbai. Right. And so I, I. One of my favorite kind of examples of this is this. Canadian Trinidadian poet Dionne Brand talks about traveling through the from the Caribbean to London. And kind of, even though she had never been to London before, she says, I, I knew where I was going, and I knew when to expect a roundabout. And I knew the urban plan of London already because I had been, in all these days, Caribbean cities where that plan had been just sort of plopped on top of these lands with another history and another geography. And so this. And I think this tension between the plans that these elite urban planners are making in London and then sort of spreading out all over the world, the tension between those plans and then the resistance to and adaptation of those plans by those who had to actually live there is so key to how we think about cities, not only in London, but all over the world now. And so I'm currently reading the novel Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau, and it takes place in Martinique. And it's all about these makeshift but really vital communities that emerge in unclaimed spaces on the margins of cities in Martinique. So I think we still feel the legacy of some of these ideas of urban planning today all over the world. And I think it's really important that we study them.
- [42:26]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's really interesting because it so directly ties this history that we might otherwise think, oh, that's only relevant to multiple hundreds of years ago to, oh, hang on a second. It is relevant to starting the 1600s, but also. Right. So I think that's a very important point to make and really takes us up to kind of where we're at now in a lot of senses. So probably a good point to conclude our discussion on the book, leaving me to just ask about the future of what you might be working on now that this project is off your desk.
- [42:55]
Dr. Julia Fawcett
Yeah, I mean, I'm sort of taking a deep breath is. Is the long and short of it, but I have a few what I call ghost chapters, which are things that didn't quite make it into the book but that I'm still interested in thinking about and so that I think will become articles. So one is about Bethlehem Asylum and changing ideas of antisocial behavior or madness as the city was changing and how that influenced the design of Bethlehem, which Bethlehem was redesigned at this moment by Robert Hooke, who was also contributing to the urban plans of London at the same time. And of course, Bethlehem is like a frequent setting on the stage at this time. So I'm kind of exploring the intersections between all of those things. I'm also working on an essay about air in this play by Mary Picks and thinking about air as performance. So she has all of these puns in her play about the putting on of airs. So air is performance, but then also thinking about early discussions of air pollution and how those came to influence urban planning at this time. And then I don't know. I think I'm gonna do a. I wanna do a big ambitious something, but I'm not sure what. I'm interested in the history play, possibly. So I've been thinking about space. I think I might want to think about time for a while, but I'm not sure what shape that will take exactly.
- [44:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, sounds like lots of intriguing possibilities. So best of luck in whatever ambition or whatever direction your ambition takes you. And in the ghost chapters, there's always ghost chapters. They're fun. So thank you for telling us a little bit about them. And of course, while you are pursuing those various directions, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Movable London's Performance and the Modern City, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2025. Julia, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [45:01]
Dr. Julia Fawcett
Thank you so much, Miranda. This was really.