Dr Sarah Burdett, Faculty of English

scb93@cam.ac.uk

 

Biographical Information

I started my education at a state school in North London before completing my BA in English Literature at the University of East Anglia (2008-2011; Starred First Class). I joined the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies / Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York in 2011 where I studied for an MA in Romantic and Sentimental Literature (2011-12; Distinction). I was awarded a full department-funded scholarship to remain at York for the completion of my PhD, producing a thesis titled 'The Martial Woman in British Theatre, 1789-1803' (2012-2016; Pass with no corrections). 

I am doubly committed to traditional academic scholarship and outward facing practice-led research, and have collaborated with creative arts partners incuding English Heritage, the Georgian Theatre Royal (Yorkshire) and the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds on theatrical revivals of eighteenth and nineteenth-century dramas, and on the organisation and delivery of accessible and inclusive workshops on historical theatre traditions. I am actively involved in outreach and WP initiatives, and have contributed to events including the Sutton Trust Summer School programme, Cambridge's Aspiring Researchers Programme, and Cambridge's Humanities Exploration Day.

I have been awarded and pursued international Visiting Research Fellowships at the University of South Carolina, USA (Roy Memorial Fellowship), the McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph, Canada (Scottish-Studies Collection Fellowship), the Bodleian Library, Oxford (BSECS-Bodliean Fellowship), and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC (Short-term Visting Fellowship). I was the 2025 recipient of the Keats-Shelley American Association Carl Pfortzheimer Research Grant. Prior to joining Cambridge, I lectured at institutions including UCL, Warwick, Plymouth, St Mary’s and York. I am currently an Associate Fellow of the HEA, and and Associate Fellow of the RHS. I co-convene the English Faculty's Eighteenth-Century and Romanctism research seminar.  

Research Interests

My research explores the intersections between theatre, gender, and nationhood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Key interests within this field include dramatic responses to the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars (formal, stylistic and affective); the censorship of political plays; illegitimate theatre; the female playwright; the figure of the actress; theatrical adaptation; and transnational dialogue and exchange. My debut monograph is titled The Arms-Bearing Woman and British Theatre in the Age of Revolution, 1789-1815 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). The book spotlights the intricate and often allegorical ways in which the figure of the female warrior intervenes in discourses pertaining to Anglo-French, Anglo-German, Anglo-Irish, and Anglo-Spanish affairs, during a period in which Briatin's relations with its home and European neighbours are in a perptual state of chnage. The study questions also the extent to which new foreign genres imported to Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century – notably, the German Sturm und Drang and the French-derived melodrama – enable possibilities for the emergence of a transcendently destructive heroine, whose coalescence of spotlessness and deadliness suits her seamlessly to an affective replication of revolutionary trauma.

I am currently working on my second book project, provisionally titled Remediating, Relocating and Re-Gendering Walter Scott: Women and Theatrical Adaptation, 1800-1871. The project disrupts androcentric and Anglocentric approaches to theatricalisations of Scott by showing female-authored dramatisations of Scott's poetry and prose, staged in professional and amateur contexts across the British Isles, to offer female theatre-makers a unique point of entry into Romantic discourses of imperialism, nationhood and race from which they were conventionally debarred. Combining feminist, postcolonial and transnational perspectives, the study signals the remarkable role played by gendered authorship and agency, as well as the geopolitical and spatial contexts of performance, in revsing the sexual, ethnic and cultural inferences embedded in Scott's source texts. Within and beyond this project, I am committed to recovering nineteenth-century female playwrights whose names have been historically omitted from the theatrical record on account of patriarchal biases. I am paticualrly interested in the untold lives, careers and writings of female Irish playwrights, and women writing for Irish theatres, across the period 1790-1890. 

Areas of Graduate Supervision

I teach on BA courses including English Literature and its Contexts (part 1 paper 6); Love, Gender, Sexuality (part 2 Paper 9); and Tragedy (Part 2 Paper 2). At MPhil level I teach on the research frameworks seminar 'Theatre Things' and have previously devised and led the specialist seminar series 'Performing Gender: The Georgian Theatre, 1740-1800'. I have supervised BA and MPhil dissertations on topics including female playwrights, actresses memoirs, the Jacobin / anti-Jacobin novel, the 1790s pamphlet wars, gothic literature and the French Revolution, Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, the Victorian novel, and nineteenth-century female life writing. 

Selected Publications

Books

Burdett, S., The Arms-Bearing Woman and British Theatre in the Age of Revolution, 1789-1815 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) The Arms-Bearing Woman and British Theatre in the Age of Revolution, 1789-1815 | SpringerLink

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Burdett, S., and Chris Bundock, 'Reviving The Tryal: A Theatrical Experiment'. Women's Writing, special Issue, 'Joanna Baillie and the Romantic Experiment' (forthcoming 2026)

Burdett, S., ‘From Paris to London via Spain: European Conflict, the Maid of Saragossa, and Transnational Dialogue and Exchange in Early British Melodrama’. Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture (forthcoming 2026)

Burdett, S., ‘“Blown to Pieces by the Delicate hand”: Women, Explosions, and Early British Melodrama; or, Theatrical Responses to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’, in Romanticism and its Media: Selected Papers from the Leipzig Conference of the German Society for English Romanticism, eds. Ralf Haekel and Julia Heinemann (Germany: WVT, 2025), pp. 47-59.

Burdett, S., ‘Warlike Heroines and Anglo-German Drama in an Age of Europhobia’. Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film, vol. 51, issue 2 (Nov. 2024), pp. 190-208. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/17483727241280466

Burdett, S., and Jonathan Hicks, 'Teaching Romantic Melodrama: Introduction'. 'Teaching Romanticism' series, Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780-1840 (Dec. 2022) https://www.romtext.org.uk/teaching-romanticism-xxxvi-romantic-melodrama/

Burdett, S., “’Tis Gallia’s Hopeless Queen!”: Resurrecting the Dead in John Philip Kemble’s Macbeth.’ Last Scene of All: Representing Death on the Western Stage, ed. Jessica Goodman (Cambridge: Legenda, 2022), pp. 43-61.https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv33b9p7v

Burdett, S., Katherine Astbury, and Diane Tisdall, ‘Excavating French Melodrama of the First Empire’. Sound Stage Screen, vol.1, no.1 (Spring 2021), pp. 7-46. https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/sss/article/view/14179

Burdett, S., ‘“Weeping Mothers Shall Applaud”: Sarah Yates as Margaret of Anjou on the London Stage, 1797.’  Comparative Drama, vol. 49, no. 4 (Winter 2015), pp. 419-444. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/vol49/iss4/3/

Burdett, S., ‘“Be Mine in Politics”: Charlotte Corday and Anti-Union Allegory in Matthew West’s Female Heroism, A Tragedy in Five Acts (1803)’. Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, vol. 30, no. 1-2, Double Issue (Summer/Winter 2015), pp. 89-108. https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/rectr/article-abstract/30/1-2/89/212079/Be-Mine-in-Politics-Charlotte-Corday-and-Anti?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Editorials

Burdett, S., and Jonathan Hicks eds., ‘Teaching Romanticism: Romantic Melodrama'. Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780-1840, 'Teaching Romanticism' series, vol. 36 (Dec. 2022)

Reviews

Burdett, S., 'Review: The Censorship of Eighteenth-Century Theatre: Playhouses and Prohibition, 1737–1843, ed. David O'Shaughnessy.' English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature (Winter 2024), pp. 664-666 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0013838X.2024.2317074

Media

Interviewee on 'Theater History Podcast', March 2026: https://theatrehistorypodcast.net/episode-111-warning-armed-women-w-dr-sarah-burdett/

Presenter's guest on 'Opera on 3', Sept. 2024, BBC Radio 3: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00236cm 

Performance-led research

'Drama Queens of the Georgian Period: A Tragic-Comic Entertainment'. Script writer, director and performer. Judith E. Wilson Studio, University of Cambridge. Cambridge Festival, April 2026 (funded by Judith E Wilson grant). 

Revival of Joanna Baillie's 'The Tryal', script writer and performer. Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds, Oct. 2024 (AHRC funded project): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3ksanlDElU

Revival of Guilbert de Pixerecourt's / Theodore Hook's 'The Fortress'. Dramaturge. Georgian Theatre Royal, Richmond, Yorkshire. Georgian Festival, Aug. 2017 (AHRC funded project)

Revival of prisoners of war melodrama 'Roseliska'. Dramaturge. Portchester Castle, July 2017 (AHRC funded project)