
British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow
Email: clare.foster@ucl.ac.uk or clef3@cam.ac.uk
Research interests: all things "Re-" (revival, revision, restaging, reframing, remembering, reproduction, reference etc); traditions of performance and the performance of tradition; adaptation and other models of persistence; theatricality; the concept of 'the classic'.
After an undergraduate degree in Classics at King's College Cambridge Clare was a Knox Fellow at Harvard (1986-7) and an AAUW Fellow at UCLA film school (1989-93), where her award-winning short film and feature scripts launched a career as a screenwriter. She specialised in literary and historical adaptations (e.g. Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong, Flora Fraser's Unruly Queen, Norman Lewis' Naples 44, Debra Kopaken's Shutterbabe, John Updike's Of The Farm) working with e.g. Mike Newell, Kristin Scott-Thomas and companies such as Fox Searchlight and Film Four. This practical experience informs her research interests in adaptation and tradition. She expanded her interests - both creative and discursive - to theatre and performance in 2011, and has been founding co-convenor of the Cambridge Interdisciplinary
Performance Network at CRASSH since 2013.
Clare returned from the USA to Britain and took the MA in Classical Reception at UCL (2008-10). This was followed by a Phd at Cambridge ('A Very British Greek Play: Greek plays in Greek in England 1880-1921'). While at Cambridge she co-convened a large number of interdisciplinary seminar series, conferences and workshops, especially at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) where she is currently a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow ('The Western Concept of the Original: Adaptation in Theory and Practice' - forthcoming as Recognition Capital.) Clare teaches modules for Approaches to Classical Reception and Ancient Rome on Film; since 2013 she has been developing a playwriting workshop at Cambridge for the BA in English and Drama, Faculty of Education.
Academia.edu research profile
Publications:
- 'Wilde and the emergence of literary drama, 1880-1895', chapter in Oscar Wilde and the Classics, (ed. K. Riley, A. Blanchard and I. Manny), OUP 2018.
- 'Familiarity and Recognition: towards a new vocabulary for Reception Studies', chapter in De Pourcq, Maarten, Rijser, David and De Hahn, Nathalie (eds) Framing Classical Reception Studies, proceedings of a Classical Reception Studies conference in Nijmegen, the Netherlands (in press).
- 'Afterword: Repetition as Recognition' for Kartsaki, Eirini and Farmer, Gareth (eds), On Repetition, proceedings of a conference at Anglia Ruskin University, Intellect, 2015.
- ''Whose Theatre is it Anyway?': Ancient Chorality Versus Modern Drama', chapter in Flynn and Tinius (eds) Anthropology, Development and Performance: Reflecting on political transformations, proceedings of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) conference at Manchester, in the Anthropology and Theatre Series, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
- Review of C. Walde (ed) 'The Reception of Classical Literature: Brill's New Pauly Supplement 5', in the Classical Review 64.1 293-295, 2014.
- German Philhellenism; Publications of the English Goethe Society (ISSN: 0959-3683); Vol 82, No. 3. Maney Publishing, (co-edited with Helen Roche and Dan Wilson); co-author with Helen Roche 'Introduction' PEGS 82.3, pp. 155-158, 2013.
- 'Summing up German Philhellenism' final chapter, PEGS 82.3, pp. 208-13, 2013.
- 'Adapting History and the History of Adaptation', chapter in Lawrence and Tutan (eds) The Adaptation of History; MacFarlane, USA, pp. 117- 128, 2013.\
Just published: Afterword to On Repetition, Writing, Performance and Art: 'Repetition as Recognition'