Publications Archive

• Valladares, Susan (2015). Staging the Peninsular War: English Theatres 1807–1815. Abingdon: Routledge.

From Napoleon's invasion of Portugal in 1807 to his final defeat at Waterloo, the English theatres played a crucial role in the mediation of the Peninsular campaign. Exploring the role of spectacle in the mediation of war and the links between theatrical productions and print culture, Staging the Peninsular War argues that the popularity of theatre-going and the improvisation and topicality unique to dramatic performance make the theatre an ideal lens for studying the construction of the Peninsular campaign in the public domain. Without simplifying the complex issues involved in the study of citizenship, communal identities, and ideological investments, this book recovers a wartime theatre that helped celebrate military engagements, reform political sympathies, and register the public’s complex relationship to the Napoleonic Wars more generally. Its long appendix takes the form of Calendars of productions at Covent Garden, Drury Lane and Bristol Theatre Royal for the years 1807 to 1815 and provides a valuable resource for researchers working in all aspects of theatre history during this period.

• Hentschke JR. Philosophical Polemics, School Reform, and Nation-Building in Uruguay, 1868-1915: Reforma Vareliana and Batllismo from a Transnational Perspective. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2016 

This monograph revisits Uruguay’s emergence as Latin America’s first welfare state democracy, associated with President José Batlle y Ordóñez (1903-7, 1911-15) and his Krausist leanings. Central to Uruguay’s belated polity formation and nation building was its school reform, destined to erase frontier backwardness. It started with the foundation of the Society of the Friends of Popular Education in 1868, culminated in José Pedro and Jacobo Varela’s transformation of primary and normal schooling in the 1870s and 1880s, and was driven by US liberal pedagogy and Spencerian positivism. Batllistas distanced themselves from the Varelas since they had lent their services to military dictators. Yet, as Hentschke argues, continuity in change prevailed over the rupture of 1903, with positivism and neo-Idealism interacting in the continuation of the education reform. By placing Uruguay into the broader context of what scholars have called the “Corridor of Ideas” from Santiago de Chile through Buenos Aires and Montevideo to Porto Alegre, Hentschke shows how the country acted as a crossroads of intellectuals and a laboratory for the contestation, assimilation,
and merger of global and autochthonous political and pedagogical philosophies

• Zon, Bennett (2017). Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

This engaging book explores the dynamic relationship between evolutionary science and musical culture in Victorian Britain, drawing upon a wealth of popular scientific and musical literature to contextualize evolutionary theories of the Darwinian and non-Darwinian revolutions. Bennett Zon uses musical culture to question the hegemonic role ascribed to Darwin by later thinkers, and interrogates the conceptual premise of modern debates in evolutionary musicology. Structured around the Great Chain of Being, chapters are organized by discipline in successively ascending order according to their object of study, from zoology and the study of animal music to theology and the music of God. Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture takes a non-Darwinian approach to the interpretation of Victorian scientific and musical interrelationships, debunking the idea that the arts had little influence on contemporary scientific ideas and, by probing the origins of musical interdisciplinarity, the volume shows how music helped ideas about evolution to evolve.