Sophie Nield

My research and writing is interdisciplinary in scope, and has been developed along three interconnected trajectories: theatricality and power (migration, borders, states, law, protest), theatricality of labour (law, demonstration, representation, contract, agency), and the history of theatricality itself (stage technology and the labour of illusion). The overarching aim of my work is to centre theatre and performance analysis at the heart of wider interdisciplinary questions; in effect, to argue that some of the complexities of public political manifestations and structures are explicitly theatrical problems, and that analysis from our disciplinary perspective can uniquely inform these debates.

My research informs my teaching and curriculum design, and this year I will be teaching two of my specialist options:

DT3118: Theatre and Power explores the theatricality of power and the performance of protest. Both power and resistance have historically used tropes of theatre and performance to symbolise, summarise and communicate message or aims. But is similarity of form the whole story? This module unpicks the structures of performance, public theatricality and street dramaturgy to explore what is at work in these encounters and ritual forms: are they, perhaps, built out of these practices, rather than simply reflections of them? What is happening when police face down protestors in public streets? What does it mean when a monarch is crowned or a President is inaugurated? How is power transferred or embodied through ritual and symbolic practices that are both representational and real? And how might theatre and performance vocabularies help us to understand these?

DT2206: Paranoia Film in the Long 1970s Influenced by imported Expressionist aesthetics and post-WWII US 'noir', reactions to US involvement in Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, nuclear paranoia and conspiracy theories all found their echoes in a series of films which took as their themes suspicion of the state and its agents, anxieties about the rights of citizens in relation to the power of the state, and issues of identity and surveillance. The 1975 Sight and Sound review of Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View (1974) criticised the film for being less a film about paranoia, and more of a paranoid film. This module takes this insight as a point of departure, arguing that this cycle of films can be analysed in terms of their structural as well as their thematic paranoia. Themes of the module include: representations of surveillance; the production of paranoid space; the aesthetics of conspiracy; paranoia and machne intelligence; paranoid futurity.

I also developed and will lead again this year the first year module DT1600: Skills Lab. This module embeds awareness of transferable and professional skills at the heart of the curriculum, and works with a broad team of colleagues from across the University to deliver specialist introductory workshops on Library, Technical Theatre, Academic, Wellbeing, Careers and Digital Media skills to underpin your study with us. The module enables you to develop a range of skills and abilities to maximise your potential and help you work towards the futures which you want to pursue.

Prior to joining Royal Holloway, I was Head of the national Centre for Excellence in Training for Theatre, a HEFCE-funded Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning located at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. I have held full-time academic posts at Goldsmiths, Roehampton University and the University of Glamorgan (now the University of South Wales) and am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. 

I welcome enquiries about research supervision in the areas of: space, theatricality and performance; film and representation; theatrical 'magic' and stage technology; historiography; ‘border’ theatres; protest, demonstration and dissent; public ceremony and political life. Please contact me on the e-mail address above if you would like to discuss your proposal.