'Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740-1820', ed O'Shaughnessy (Cambridge UP, 2019) illuminates theatre as a crucial forum for the representation of Irish civility and culture for the eighteenth-century English audience. Irish actors and playwrights, operating both as individuals and within networks, were remarkably popular and potent during this period, especially in London. As ideas of Enlightenment percolated throughout Britain and Ireland, Irish theatrical practitioners - actors, managers, playwrights, critics and journalists - exploited a growing receptivity to Irish civility, and advanced a patriot agenda of political and economic autonomy. Mobility, toleration and the capacity to negotiate multiple allegiances are marked features of this Irish theatrical Enlightenment, whose ambitious participants saw little conflict between their twin loyalties to the Crown and to Ireland. This collection of essays responds to recent work in the areas of eighteenth-century theatre studies, Irish studies and Enlightenment studies. The volume's discussions of genre, colonialism, gender, race, music, slavery, and dress open up new avenues of scholarship and research across disciplines.
David Francis Taylor, University of Oxford, offers this endorsement on the Cambridge UP website: '‘Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740–1820 makes a bold and necessary intervention in the field. Its essays shed important new light on the dynamic contribution to English theatrical culture made by a multitude of Irish practitioners and also productively challenge the foundations of what we take ‘the Enlightenment' to be in relation to ideas of nation, cosmopolitanism, and cultural production.'
My work on this volume was focused on Charles Macklin, an eighteenth-century actor and playwright who wrote an important history play. I co-organised the first symposium on Macklin with a colleague at Notre Dame and it took place in London, June 2018. We are editing a collection of essays 'Charles Macklin and the Practice of Enlightenment' to be published my Liverpool University Press in 2020.'
I also became one of the two general editors of a major 8 volume edition of Goldsmith's work (Cambridge UP), a significant achievement beyond the state of the art. This will be the first edition since the 1960s and will take into account of over a half century of scholarship as well as expanding Goldsmith's oeuvre. The new edition will include a volume of his work as a historian and seek to put it into the context of the historiographical disputes of the mid 18th century, as well as ongoing Enlightenment debates about the responsibilities of a historian.
