Julia Fawcett's research explores the emergence of circum-Atlantic "modernity" through the histories of celebrity, privacy, urban planning, changeable scenery, race, and empire in the long eighteenth-century. Her second book, Movable Londons: Performance and the Modern City (University of Michigan Press, 2025), explores how those who did not or could not own property (including women, immigrants, enslaved people, servants, and religious minorities) shaped the spaces and performances of Restoration London after the Great Fire of 1666. Her first book, Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696-1801(link is external) (University of Michigan Press, 2016), was a Finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association. It examines the performance and literary strategies that England’s first celebrities used to protect their private lives despite always being in the public eye—and how their strategies might help us to navigate a world in which social media has eroded the distinctions between private lives and public events. Fawcett has served as a dramaturge in New York and as a scholar-in-residence at Harbourfront World Stage in Toronto; her essays have appeared in PMLA, Theatre Survey, Eighteenth Century Studies, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Modern Drama.
Education: Ph.D. in English Literature, Yale University
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theater and Performance
Performance Historiography
Intersections Between Literature and Performance
Autobiographical Performance
Urban Space
Celebrity
Gender
