Central’s Dr Naomi Paxton to speak at London’s V&A Museum
On Saturday 6 November at 2.00pm Dr Naomi Paxton, Central’s Knowledge Exchange Fellow, will give a free, public talk at the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Lecture Theatre entitled ‘Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you join the Suffrage dance? Alice’s adventures in Edwardian activist theatre’.
The talk will tie in with the Museum’s current Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser exhibition and is based on a similarly themed chapter by Dr Paxton in the volume Women’s Suffrage in Word, Image, Music and Drama; The Making of a Movement which was edited by Christopher Riley and Lucy Ella Rose and published by Routledge earlier this year.
During the event, Dr Paxton will look at how Alice’s adventures were reframed in British and American suffrage plays. By the 1910s, the Victorian children who had first been captivated by Lewis Carroll’s books such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland were all grown up; some had joined the campaign for Votes for Women and, informed by their own confusing experiences of dealing with those in power, were thinking afresh about Alice’s attempts to make sense of her Wonderland world.
A very special performance of some of Liza Lehmann’s Nonsense Songs from Alice in Wonderland will feature and, alongside the songs, extracts from suffrage plays will be performed by members of the Suffrage Plays reading group. The hour-long event, filled with interesting, funny and curious stories of suffrage performance inspired by Alice in Wonderland, will be one for fans of Carroll’s books, theatre history, music history and women’s history scholars and enthusiasts alike.
The talk is free to attend but tickets must be booked in advance (via free, timed entry tickets to the Museum) on the V&A’s website.
Dr Naomi Paxton is Central’s Knowledge Exchange Fellow, a theatre historian and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an Associate Fellow of the School of Advanced Study, University of London and an AHRC/ BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker.
Dr Paxton was a recent guest on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour discussing the history of women in magic.
Dr Paxton also recently appeared on the BBC Radio 3 Arts and Ideas programme discussing Black British Theatre and women in theatre, and the place of women in the National Theatre’s Black Plays Archive. For the programme, Dr Paxton interviewed author Stephen Bourne and Central PhD Candidate and host of the AHRC, National Theatre and Central’s That Black Theatre Podcast, Nadine Deller.
Find out more about Dr Paxton and her work by visiting her website or by listening to her interview on the Discover Central Podcast.
