Department of English

• Monday, April 20, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

We are thrilled to welcome Michael C. Gamer (University of Pennsylvania) and Deven Parker (University of Glasgow) for a talk titled “Slow History on Stage (and Page): The Other Burney Collection.”

Prof. Gamer and Prof. Parker write:

"Though less well known than his sister, novelist Frances Burney, and his father Charles Burney, the celebrated music theorist and historian, Charles Burney, Jr. lives on today in the collection of print ephemera he amassed—most famously British newspapers, but also works of literature and playbills. Now housed in the British Library, his collections are among the largest in existence; yet, they also have generally been regarded as the fruits of failed projects: his plans for editions of scholarly correspondence and for a comprehensive history of the British stage never realized despite the troves of documents he assembled for them. 

In this presentation, we view his collections not as the accumulated materials of unrealized works, but rather as experiments in bookmaking and in chronicling one’s own time through the codex. Unlike other theatrical histories of the stage, Burney compiled his as a temporal chronicle of mixed media, combining playbills, newspaper cuttings, theatrical prints, music scores, programmes, and other theatrical ephemera to create a slowed-down, incremental history of the stage. The volumes he created eschew the conventional categories of theatrical histories and green room accounts, rejecting theatre, region, actor, or anecdote as organizing rubrics. Burney instead presents the theatrical scene in weekly – and sometimes even daily – cross-sections, so that theatres and actors appear either in dialogue with one another or responding en masse to whatever topical event might at that moment seize public imagination. This slow history allows for the tracking of people and dramatic forms across geographies and between stages. The picture of theatre history that emerges is one of co-creation, competition, and dialogue. Burney imagines history as an interactive project, and like the book itself, perpetually in the state of being re-cut, re-made, and re-organized."

Michael Gamer is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Beyond his two monographs – Romanticism and the Gothic (Cambridge UP, 2000) and Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2017), he has published widely on Romantic-period theatre, including the Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama (with Jeffrey Cox; Broadview Press, 2003); A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Age of Empire (with Diego Saglia; Bloomsbury, 2021); and essays in The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama (Cambridge UP, 2018), The Visual Life of Romantic Theater, 1780-1830 (University of Michigan Press, 2023), Theatre Survey, ELH, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and other journals. 

Deven Parker is Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Glasgow, where she is carrying out research on Romantic authorship and dramatic copyright. Her first monograph, Romantic Media and Wartime Networks, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Her essays have appeared in SEL 1500-1900, Studies in Romanticism, Essays in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Umanistica Digitale, and elsewhere. With Michael Gamer, she is currently completing The Romantic Playbill for the Cambridge University Press Elements in Eighteenth-Century Connections series, and a performance database of English melodrama, provisionally titled Romantic Melodrama, to be housed at the University of Glasgow.