Academic on sabbatical at Oxford

Academic on sabbatical at Oxford

Katharine Mitchell (School of Humanities) is currently on research leave from Strathclyde and spending her sabbatical in Oxford where she is a Visiting Fellow at St. Catherine’s College. Upon hearing that a friend had spent some of her research leave at Oxford, Kate followed her lead and explored the opportunities for fellowships. From Oxford, Kate has sent the following report:

‘My main purpose in applying for the fellowship was to gain access to the Bodleian library’s unrivalled excellent resources in the writing of my forthcoming book, Gender, Writing, Spectatorships: Evenings at the Theatre, Opera and Silent Screen in Italy and Beyond, 1870 to 1915 (forthcoming with Routledge), but I was also keen to expand my academic network, too. I noticed from their website that the Fellow in French at ‘Catz’ had written a book on the reception of the Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni in Paris, and the Professor of Music had published on opera singers, so I contacted them both to ask if they would support my application and they agreed. My project takes a cross-disciplinary approach to spectatorship studies, drawing on film, theatre and opera in turn-of-the-century Italy - a period in which the melodramatic mode was at its most popular. It identifies a gendered public sphere made up of middle-class female spectators who, through their reading of serialised novels

and articles addressed to women on theatre and operagoing in women’s periodicals, were being encouraged to watch with an epistemophilic gaze (one that was curious and wanted to know) and to identify with the performers of what I term ‘woman’s opera’, ‘woman’s theatre’ and the silent diva film, as critical consumers.

I’ve connected with colleagues in Italian at Oxford and regularly go to lunch and formal guest nights at my College (the food and wine at Catz is excellent). I’ve found the people I’ve met to be welcoming, interesting and engaging. Coincidentally, the Emeritus Professor of Music taught me during my undergraduate years at the University of Leeds when during my first year I studied music. On meeting him again after over twenty years, I was immediately reminded of his class on bourgeois concertgoers and how he accompanied us to a concert at Leeds Town Hall; sometimes life can be strange, and it is as if I have gone full circle: in addition to my book project, I now regularly take our students to see an Italian play or opera in Glasgow. Here, in Oxford, I’m really benefitting from the extensive resources in the Taylorian Library – the Modern Languages library - and I’m hoping to remain beyond my fellowship to have some continuity of access to the wonderful resources here.’