Daniel O'Quinn

Professor

College of Arts, School of Theatre, English, and Creative Writing

Corrosive Solace: Affect, Biopolitics, and the Realignment of the Repertoire, 1780-1800

Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690-1815

Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770-1790

Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800 [Open Access]

The Routledge Pantomime Reader, 1800-1900

Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Performance

Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama

The Turkish Embassy Letters

The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan

Sporting Cultures: 1650-1850

The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Theatre

My research focuses on theatre, performance and sociability; on the historical analysis of race, class, sexuality, and gender; and on genealogies of present norms regarding the body and social relations. This work partakes of three related developments in the study of late 18th century culture. My work on European relations with the Ottoman Empire, on British-India, and on various trans-Atlantic topics are part of the ongoing re-evaluation of British imperial culture. My books and essays on theatre and sociability are part of a full-scale attempt by a host of scholars to re-think performance cultures in Britain from 1750-1830. And my fundamental commitment to the historical analysis of race, class, sexuality, and gender places my writing within a larger body of research, which has attempted to perform a genealogy of present norms derived from past colonial and imperial configurations of power.

Publications

I am most recently the author of Corrosive Solace: Affect, Biopolitics, and the Realignment of the Repertoire (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690-1815 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) was shortlisted for the Kenshur Prize. Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770-1790 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), received Honorable Mention for the Joe A. Callaway Prize from New York University, and my first book, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), received Honorable Mention for the Bernard Hewitt Prize for Excellence in Theatre History from the American Society for Theatre Research. Corrosive Solace, Entertaining Crisis, and Staging Governance form a trilogy of sorts exploring the performance cultures of late eighteenth-century Britain.

I have also co-edited three essay collections: The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730-1830 (2007) with Jane Moody; Georgian Theatre in an Information Age, a special double-issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, with Gillian Russell; and Sporting Cultures: 1650-1850 (University of Toronto Press, 2017) with Alexis Tadié.

Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1737-1837

My recent work on European-Ottoman relations arose from editorial work on three eighteenth-century travel narratives. In addition to preparing The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan for Broadview Press (2008) and Lady Elizabeth Craven's A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople for Gorgias Press (2010), I have also co-edited, with Teresa Heffernan, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's The Turkish Embassy Letters from Broadview Press (2012). My essays on the intersection of race, sexuality and class in a range of cultural milieus have appeared in various journals including ELH, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, Eighteenth-Century Studies, October, Studies in Romanticism, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Theatre Journal, Documents, European Romantic Review, Romantic Praxis and in a wide array of essay collections. These are listed in my CV at the bottom of this page. And finally I have had the great pleasure of editing two separate anthologies with Kristina Straub and Misty Anderson: The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenh-Century Performance and The Routlledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama.

Routledge Anthology of Restoration and 18th Century Performance

Routledge Anthology of Restoration and 18th Century Drama

Education

PhD, York University (1993)

MA, University of Western Ontario (1987)

BSc, University of Western Ontario (1985)

Funding

2022-27 SSHRC Insight Grant, “Re-Activating the Repertoire: Proto-Orientalist Theatre and the Performance of the Present”

2017 New College Residential Fellowship, Oxford University

2013-18 SSHRC Insight Grant, “Georgian Networks: Media Saturation and the London Ethnoscape, 1760-1820”

2009-12 SSHRC Standard Research Grant, “Despotic Alliances: Romanticism, Islam and the Spectres of France”

2004-7 SSHRC Faculty Grant, “Other Things: Romantic Masculinity and the Incorporation of Race”

2001-4 SSHRCC Faculty Grant, “Staging Governance: Comedy, Coloniality, and the Education of Desire”

Awards and Honours

2019 Kenshur Prize, Short-listed for Engaging the Ottoman Empire

2010-11 Joe A. Callaway Prize for best book in Drama and Theatre, Honourable Mention, NYU. (for Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium)

2006 Bernard Hewitt Award for Excellence in Theatre History, Honorable Mention, American Society for Theatre Research (for Staging Governance)

2004 Nominated for an OCUFA Teaching Award.

2003 College of Arts Research Enhancement Award, $5000

2000 College of Arts Teaching Award, University of Guelph

1993-95 SSHRCC Post-Doctoral Fellow, Cornell University

Co-editor with Teresa Heffernan, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Turkish Embassy Letters (Peterboroough: Broadview, forthcoming 2012).

Editor, Lady Elizabeth Craven, A Journey Through the Crimea to Constantinople (London: Gorgias Press, 2010).

Editor, The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan. (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2009)

Co-editor with Jane Moody, The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre 1737-1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)

2. Chapters in Books{C}

2017 “Knowledge Transmission”, in Mechele Leon, ed. Cultural History of the Theatre (London: Bloomsbury, 2017)

2017 “Funeral Games: Ludic Events, Imperial Violence, Authorial Encounters” in O’Quinn and Tadié, ed. Sporting Cultures, 1650-1850. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017)

2017 "Proxy Israelites: Staging Ethnic Violence in the Ring and the Pit," in Kevin Gilmartin, The Sociable Spaces of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

2015 “Invalid Elegy and Gothic Pageantry: André, Seward and the Loss of the American War,” Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture ed. Neil Ramsey and Gillian Russell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

2014 “Stealing Culture in the Shadow of Revolutions,” British Romanticism: Criticism and Debates ed. Mark Canuel (New York: Routledge, 2014), 37-68.

2014 “Theatre, Islam and the Question of Monarchy,” In Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre 1737-1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) 638-654.

2014 “Facing Past and Future Empires: Joshua Reynolds’s Portraits of Augustus Keppel,” Culture of the Seven Years War ed. Frans De Bruyn and Shaun Regan (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2014), 307-338.

2013 “Pizarro’s Spectacular Dialectics: Sheridan’s Bridge to the Cosmopolitical Future,” Impresario: Richard Brinsley Sheridan in Political and Cultural Context ed. Jack de Rocchi and Daniel Ennis (Bucknell Univ. Press, 2013), 191-233.

2012 “In the Face of Difference: Molineaux, Cribb and the Violence of the Fancy,” Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic ed. Paul Youngquist (London: Ashgate Press, 2014).

2010 “Scarcity and Surplus : Teaching Elizabeth Inchbald’s Every One Has His Fault Through the Papers. Teaching British Women Playwrights of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century ed. Catherine Burroughs and Bonnie Nelson (New York: MLA, 2010), 398-408.

2009 “Jane Austen and Performance: Theatre, Memory and Enculturation” Blackwell Companion to Jane Austen ed. Claudia Johnson and Clara Tuite (London: Blackwell, 2009), 377-88.

2008 “Fox’s Tears: The Staging of Liquid Politics” Spheres of Action: The Concept of Performance in Romantic Thought ed. Angela Esterhammer and Alex J. Dick (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming November 2008)

2006 Elizabeth Inchbald, Wives as They Were, Maids as They Are in British Women Playwrights around 1800 Ed. Thomas Crochunis and Michael Eberle-Sinatra. Peterborough: Broadview Press, (forthcoming 2008)

2007 “Theatre and Empire”, The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre 1737-1837 ed. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)

2006 "Torrents and Flames: Battling Hindu Superstition on the London Stage” in Romantic India ed. Michael J. Franklin (London: Routledge, 2006)