Department of Archaeology
Louise Calf
Research project
Research project title: A ‘Room to Make a Row In’: A social and architectural study of the private theatre in Chatsworth House, 1828-1907
Supervisor/s: Prof. Kate Giles, Dr Oliver Jones & Fran Baker, Archivist for the Chatsworth House Trust
Funding: White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities (WRoCAH) AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) studentship
Research Interests
The materiality and social entanglements of country house theatre in the 19th century; country house estate relations in the 19th century; backstage in 19th-century theatres; archival and embodied methods of researching buildings.
Research Project
My PhD is a Collaborative Doctoral Award between the University of York and the Chatsworth House Trust. The project takes an interdisciplinary, broadly biographical approach to examine the social and architectural development of the theatre in Chatsworth House, an exceptionally well-preserved and nationally-significant example of a late-19th-century private theatre.
The thesis analyses the earliest developments of the room in its phase as a ‘Banqueting Room’ under the 6th Duke of Devonshire, before going on to consider backstage labour practices and networks as well as the organisation of the auditorium at the end of the 19th century. The thesis seeks to situate the Theatre in a wider context of country house and estate life and architecture, drawing out stories of individuals broadly overlooked in the public record, recentring their experiences in and of Chatsworth’s Theatre, to redress the imbalance of representation in traditionally elite spaces.
