Dr Leith Davis
Leith Davis is a professor in the Department of English and Director of the Research Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. She is the author of Acts of Union: Scotland and the Negotiation of the British Nation (Stanford University Press, 1998) and Music, Postcolonialism and Gender: The Construction of Irish National Identity, 1725-1875 (Notre Dame University Press, 2005), as well as co-editor of Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture (Ashgate, 2012) and The International Companion to Scottish Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century (ASLS, 2021). Her new book, Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland: From the 1688 Revolution to the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion was published in 2021 with Cambridge University Press. She is also Principal Investigator of the “Lyon in Mourning” and "Early Circus" Digital Humanities projects.
For this University of Glasgow Library Visiting Research Fellowship, I will be conducting research on early Scottish circus for a research project on “National Roots and Transatlantic Routes of Early Circus.” Circus originated in the late eighteenth century as a form of popular entertainment mixed with political commentary, beginning with Astley’s Amphitheatre in Lambeth (1768) then expanding to locations in the British Isles such as Dublin (1773), Birmingham (1787) and Edinburgh (1790). Circuses were also established in transatlantic centres such as Philadelphia (1793), New York (1795) and Montreal (1797), as well as in locations in Europe and Russia. As circus evolved, it came to include not just equestrian and acrobatic acts but also: re-enactments of historical events; “exotic” acts from spaces under British colonial rule such as India, Africa and North America; performances of “national songs” from Scotland and Ireland; and, eventually, pantomime theatrical spectacles which combined all of the above. My project examines how the form of the circus and the specific acts which it included were altered to reflect local, national and transnational identities at a time during which the British empire was transforming. I am particularly interested in how acts were replicated and/or revised in different locations and how they were marketed to different populations.
This University of Glasgow Library Visiting Research Fellowship will enable me to focus on the local, national and transnational connections of early circus in Scotland, filling a gap in the research on this important genre of mass entertainment.
