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
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.
