“Fashionable Enemies: Glamour as Argument, 1770-1830” engages the forthcoming stage revival of Mary Berry’s Fashionable Friends (1801) in the context of “Artful Nature: Fashion and Theatricality, 1770-1830,” an exhibition opening on February 6, 2020 at the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, CT, curated by Professor Laura Engel (Duquesne University) and Professor Amelia Rauser (Franklin & Marshall College). At a revolutionary moment in history, extraordinary women make new claims on “Nature” and express them boldly through embodied performances on the stage and in life.

Joseph Roach has chaired the Department of Performing Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre at Northwestern University, and the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. His most recent book is It (Michigan, 2007), a study of charismatic celebrity.