Dr Will Pooley (Bristol) and Dr Poppy Corbett

Dr Will Pooley: I am a social and cultural historian of popular culture and folklore in France since 1789. My interests include witchcraft, magic, and the Occult, including their connections to the history of science and medicine, as well as gender and family history, rural history, crime history, and anthropology. I also have a special interest in the field of 'creative histories', in the sense of histories that are made in collaborative and imaginative ways, and told in formats other than straightforward non-fiction prose, such as theatre, games, poetry, and fiction.

Dr Poppy Corbett: I’ve been writing plays since 2008. Most recently, I was commissioned by Arts Educational to write Applause, a play for their graduating MA actors (2017). In 2015 my play It’s My Partywon the ‘First Draft’ Lambeth Playwriting competition and in 2013 my play Hatchling won Masterclass at the Theatre Royal Haymarket’s inaugural ‘Pitch Your Play’ competition. As a playwright, I enjoy working collaboratively with other artists and often like to engage in processes of R&D and devising as part of my playwriting process.

I recently passed my PhD – Theatre of the Real and Precarity 2000 – 2018: indexical traces of the real in the theatrical work of Alecky Blythe, Tim Crouch and Kim Noble.It was supervised by Dr Chris Megson at Royal Holloway, University of London. In the thesis I argue that contemporary English theatre since the millennium is marked by a distinctive engagement between the real and precarity. To explore this, I use three theatrical case studies to investigate how the real functions dramaturgically in contemporary theatre.