Dr Janice Norwood

Janice Norwood is a Visiting Research Fellow in Literature having previously been a Senior Lecturer specialising in English Literature and Theatre. She holds a BA (Hons) degree in English and Theatre Studies from the University of Warwick, and both an MA in Victorian Studies and a PhD from the University of Leicester. She has taught at both these institutions.

Janice's research focuses on nineteenth-century theatre and popular culture. She is the author of Victorian Touring Actresses: Crossing Boundaries and Negotiating the Cultural Landscape (Manchester University Press, 2020). Other published work covers a range of interdisciplinary topics including Wilkie Collins, Victorian pantomime, industrial protest, nineteenth-century performances of Shakespeare and the actress and theatre manager Lucia Vestris. Janice is currently writing a book about the Britannia Theatre, a Victorian working-class theatre situated in the East End of London. She is also working on a collaborative project on deathly spectatorship with Dr Hayley Bradley of University of Manchester and preparing a volume of nineteenth-century theatrical documents for a series to be published by Routledge. 

While working on Victorian Touring Actresses she began collaborating with dancer and choreographer Julia Cheng to create a performance based on this research. The piece, initially funded by Sparks Might Fly and provisionally entitled 'Ghost Papers', highlights its connections to the experience of twenty-first-century female artists.

Janice is co-editor of the journal Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film and a member of the editorial board of the Gaskell Journal.

• 19th-century theatre history and performance practice
• Victorian popular culture
• Interaction between theatre and visual culture
• Stage adaptations of fiction
• Literature of the East End of London
• Death in the nineteenth century