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Congratulations to Dr Zak Eastop on Passing His Viva
We are delighted to congratulate Dr Zak Eastop on the successful defence of his doctoral thesis “Hybridity, Hierarchy, and Couleur Rabelaisienne: The Afterlives of François Rabelais on the Late Nineteenth-Century Parisian Lyric Stage (1855-1895)”. Zak passed his viva, conducted by Professor Neil Kelly (Oxford) and Dr Tommaso Sabbatini (Bristol), with flying colours in May.
Focussed around four musico-theatrical ‘adaptations’ of Rabelais’ sixteenth-century works that appeared on the lyric stages of Paris between 1855 and 1895, Zak’s thesis addresses wider questions about the nature of the reception and reproduction of cultural artefacts. It interrogates the relationship between Rabelais’s texts and biography, their late nineteenth-century lyric afterlives, the period’s lyric culture (particularly its genre hierarchies), and ideas about the writer’s life and works that were in currency during that time. As a highly interdisciplinary project, Zak’s PhD was supervised by (L-R) Professor Richard Scholar and Professor Kathryn Banks (Modern Languages and Cultures) and Dr Katherine Hambridge (Music).