How are chances for social rise in England and its colonial contact zones negotiated in the freshly reopened theatres of the 17th-century Restoration era? This project explores the staged debates about social concepts of merit, forms of social rise and a politics of change against the backdrop of a transcultural setting in restoration England and its theatre. Restoration drama offers multiple projections of upward-mobility and self-realisation in spaces torn between outward-oriented colonialist-explorative projects on the one hand and internal processes of finding a viable system of conviviality and political organisation in the aftermath of civil war on the other.
Researcher: Maria Pace Aquilina
CONFERENCES:
- 21-06-2024 CLIC/CEREP Research Day: Merlit Overview of the Research Project
- 8-11-2024 EUTOPIA Autumn School: Aspects in Multilingualism in English-Language Literature: Past and Present
- 12-06-2024 MULTILINGUALISM and LITERATURE Fourteenth Annual Study Day of the Centre of Literary and Intermedial Crossings (CLIC): Multilingualism during the Restoration Era in England: Shaping the Social, Political and Cultural Scene
- 2/4-04-2025 The 35th International Sederi Conference on EARLY MODERN TRAVAIL: Travail as a Restoration Vision: Staging the Early-Modern Self
- 28-11-2025 VAL Symposium 2025: Gender Anxieties? (Re-)Assessments from a Literary and Cultural Studies Perspective: Dangerous Women: Gender Anxiety and Female Agency in Aphra Behn's The Rover
- 13/15-05-2026 The 36th International Sederi Conference on SECRET SPACES AND HIDDEN DESIRES: Visible/Invisible: Spatial Secrecy and Social Performance in William Wycherely’s The Country Wife
- 31/08-2/09-2026 ESSE International Conference on VIOLENCE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH DRAMA – FROM STAGE TO SCREEN: Masks, Desire, and Moral Spectacle: Violence in Aphra Behn's The Rover
PUBLICATIONS:
- Women Writers in Tudor England: Male Occluded Female Agency and the Recovery of the Authorial Voice - A dissertation presented to the School of English, University of Sheffield in partial fulfilment of the requirements for Doctor of Philosophy in English, June 2022 https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/32432/
- Multilingualism during the Restoration Era in England: Negotiating Prestige Through French in Theatrical Performance - Forthcoming publication in the Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (JLIC) https://clic.research.vub.be/journal
ACTIVITIES:
Co-organised the International Conference “Writing Meritocracy: Figurations of a Concept across Literary History and Contexts of Literary Production,” held at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (18–20 September 2025), in collaboration with Prof. Dr Eva Ulrike Pirker and Prof. Dr Suzanne Scafe.
Hosting an academic visitor from the University of Warwick: Natalya Din-Kariuki (4-6 March 2026), in collaboration with Maxime Honinx and Florian Deroo.
