Prof Gilli Bush-Bailey

BA, MA, PhD
Job title
Professor Emerita of Women’s Performance History
Gilli Bush-Bailey
Orcid ID
0000-0002-7664-3112
Institutional Repository

Profile

I am honoured to be Professor Emerita at Central and to be able to continue my connection with the vibrant research culture that Central offers to students and colleagues working across the arts and creative industries.

My first career as an actress began when I was twelve years old. I trained at Arts Educational (London) but left school at fifteen to make the televised film series Here Come the Double Deckers (1970) going on to more acting work in television and then theatre. My academic training, therefore, started rather later as a mature student at Kingston University (BA English) where I returned as a part-time lecturer to work with a team founding a new drama degree programme (2000). My postgraduate degrees were undertaken in the Department of Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London (MA in Research, 1997; PhD, 2000), where I then took up my first full-time lectureship (2001). I taught theatre and performance history, creating undergraduate courses in Restoration Theatre, West End and Commercial Theatre, Melodrama, and Comedy, that revived and revised the stories of women and performance practice from 1660 right up to contemporary stand-up performance. I was Director of Graduate Studies for four years and Head of Department for a further three years, during which I took a leading role in delivering the department’s landmark Caryl Churchill Theatre.

I have held several funding awards for research from AHRC and, most recently I held a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship (2019) for research on the international tour of Emma Stanley’s one-woman show The Seven Ages of Woman.

I was Chair of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) for four years and I am delighted to have been given an honorary life membership by that organisation. I am also an honorary life member of the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments (SCUDD) and a member of Equity.

Areas of Expertise

My research and publication work is interested in how we tell stories about women as performance practitioners, and how such stories are made and told by today’s practitioners. My research and publication work has led to invitations to:

  • Lead workshops connected to women and theatre (RNT)
  • Act as historical advisor on theatre productions (RSC)
  • Write programme notes for theatre productions (RSC, ETT)
  • Consult as lead academic partner on gender equality in theatre (Tonic Theatre Advance)

PhD Supervision

I am no longer supervising PhD candidates, but always happy to respond to research enquiries in my area of expertise. 

Key Publications

2021, Touring Performance and Global Exchange 1850-1960: Making Tracks, edited by Gilli Bush-Bailey & Kate Flaherty - Forthcoming Routledge 2021.  ISBN: 9780367519506 (HB) and 9781003055860 (EB)

2019, ‘Mabel Constanduros: Different Voices, Voicing Difference’, in Stage Women: Female Theatre Workers, Professional Practice and Agency in the Twentieth Century – 1900-1950s, edited by Maggie B. Gale and Katherine Dorney (Manchester: Manchester University Press) pp. 262-285

2014. ‘Shifting Scenes: The Child Performer and Her Audience Revisited in the Digital Age’, in Entertaining Children edited by Gillian Arrighi and Victor Emeljanow (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 111-127

2014, ‘The Gerbini Letters; or a Tale of Two Mothers’, in Stage Mothers, edited by Laura Engel and Elaine McGirr (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press), pp. 233-249

2013. ‘Biting the Hand that Feeds Her’, Women and Comedy, edited by Peter Dickinson et.al. (Madison, Teaneck: Farleigh Dickinson University Press), pp. 133-144

2012. ‘Re: Enactment’, in the Cambridge Companion to Theatre History edited by David Wiles and Chris Dymkowski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 281-298

2012. ‘Women Like Us’ (special edition) Comedy Studies, 3.2. pp. 151-159

2012. ‘Plays and Performance Texts by British and American Women from the Modernist Period 1880-1930’edited by Maggie B. Gale and Gilli Bush-Bailey (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

2011. Performing Herself: AutoBiography & Fanny Kelly’s Dramatic Recollections. (Manchester: Manchester University Press).  

2006. Treading the Bawds (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

Register of Interest

Nothing to declare.