Michael Meeuwis

I write about British literature, political theory, and theories of performance. Everyone's Theater: Literature and Daily Life in England, 1860-1914 (University of Michigan Press, 2019) reconstructs the mass popular theatre of England in the later nineteenth century. I build around these popular performances a media theory of later-Victorian personhood and politics. Finance and Property on the Post-Brexit London Stage: We Want What You Have (Routledge, 2021) turns to the very recent past. Here, I theorize recent London performance via life and politics in the city following the UK's decision to leave the European Union. I show how private property ownership has become an unquestioned value in even the most progressive venues. As part of teaching Austen in Theory, I'm completing Reading Austen Now, a reading manual for advanced general readers seeking to read the novels more closely: in their own right, and in terms of their era's dominant philosophies. Finally, a new monograph, very tentatively titled Look Back in Race, returns me to archives around the UK to uncover an intersectional history of the postwar English stage.

I like big stories about culture told through overlooked details. Running throughout my work is an interest in how cultural metanarratives--systems like aesthetic philosophy, political theory, or governmental advice--play out in the granular lived experience of texts designated as "literary."

I'm a literary historian of the British eighteenth through twenty-first centuries, with an ongoing interest in theatre and performance; or, a performance historian with a side hustle in literature. My first book discusses performance in Britain and its empire during the later Victorian and Edwardian periods; my second, performance in post-Brexit London. I'm currently moving backwards to write about Jane Austen, and slightly less farther back to consider the migrant history of England's 1950 and 1960s theatre.

As the ramp-up to the second book, I maintained an informal theatregoing blog.