Professor Robert W Jones

Profile

I was appointed to a lectureship in the School of English at Leeds in 2000. I had previously worked for five years at what was then the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. My doctorate, awarded in 1995, was undertaken at the University of York, Harriet Guest was my supervisor. I had previously studied for my BA and MA at the University of Sussex.

Responsibilities

• Associate Director of LAHRI
• Joint Honours Tutor

Research interests

As a specialist in the culture and politics of Georgian Britain, I have two principal areas of research: political distinctly parliamentary history and theatre history. Both projects are united by the life and career of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) who was first a successful dramatist, writing The Rivals and The School for Scandal in the 1770s, before becoming first the owner of Drury Lane Theatre in 1776 and MP for Stafford in 1780. Sheridan would remain in the Commons until 1812. His career was superlative as well as long. A frequent and much praised speaker, Sheridan was involved in crucial debates on electoral and economic reform, colonial governance in Ireland and India, and the French Revolution. His witty, acute, and rhetorically powerful speeches featured prominently in the newspapers of the day, as Sheridan became a prominent opposition voice through which contemporaries made sense of the political scene.

My research on Sheridan’s plays and theatrical work led my acting as the Historical Consultant for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2024 production of The School for Scandal (dir. Tinuke Craig).

Alongside these projects, I maintain an interest in the portrait painter and first President of the Royal Academic, Sir Joshua Reynolds. I am particularly interested in how his work engages with the representation of speech and sound. This work has led most recently to my article on Reynolds’s deafness in the Oxford Art Journal. 

Major Projects

I am currently editing, working with Martyn Powell, Rachel Sulich and Alexis Wolf, on a multi-volume edition of The Political Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, which will be published by Oxford University Press. We aim to produce an edition which incorporates all of Sheridan’s parliamentary and extra-parliamentary speeches together with his fragmentary political essays. The project is innovative in its use of newspaper archives (Sheridan paid little attention to his own records) to recover Sheridan’s words from the complex print culture and mediascape in which they were first reported and printed. On its completion, the edition will provide scholars with access to Sheridan’s speeches for the first time since the hasty production of a partial edition in 1816. Crucially the edition will capture the divergence and variation inherent in the surviving accounts of his words. I explored this aspect of the project for my recent essay in Litteraria Pragensia. Funding for the foundational phase of this project came from via a generous grant from the Leverhulme Trust in 2016. Further funding came from the MHRA in 2019.

I am also writing, though much more slowly, a monograph exploring Sheridan’s ownership of Drury Lane theatre, exploring that theatre not only in relation to Sheridan’s own plays and their place in repertoire, but equally the finance and management of one of only two licenced theatres in the capital. Some work towards this project has already appeared, notably my 2013 Theatre Survey article, ‘Competition and Community: Mary Tickell and the Management of Sheridan’s Drury Lane’. Funding for that project came from the British Academy and the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2010. I have since written about different aspects of The School for Scandal and the Drury Lane production of the comic opera Richard Cœur de Lion. With a few of the chapters already written the book is provisionally titled, The Theatre of Richard Brinsley Sheridan: Drury Lane, Politics and Performance 1775-1787.

• The Sheridan Project

Qualifications

• BA (Sussex)
• MA (Sussex)
• DPhil (York)

Research groups and institutes

• Textual Histories Research Group