Research

I am working on an AHRC funded collaborative project, between the University of Sussex and the National Trust, focussing on a collection of Early Modern plays at Petworth House. The main focus of my research is the relationship between dramatic performance and consumption at Petworth and in the wider seventeenth-century English country house scene. My work centres on the idea of "performing consumption and consuming performance", including depictions of celebratory feast, luxury and plenty in drama and other literature, social commentary on the dangers of consumption, metaphors of consumption, anthropomorphic and allegorical depictions of food, conspicuous consumption, consumerism, and the collection of goods for display and for reading.