The Cambridge Companion to the Circus (2021) Edited by Gillian Arrighi, University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Jim Davis, University of Warwick (University of Cambridge Press) 

This book gives new insight into acting and theatre-making through The Cambridge Companion to the Circus provides a complete guide for students, scholars, teachers, researchers, and practitioners who are seeking perspectives on the foundations and evolution of the modern circus, the contemporary extent of circus studies, and the specialised literature available to support further enquiries. The volume brings together an international group of established and emerging scholars working across the multi-disciplinary domain of circus studies to present a clear overview of the specialised histories, aesthetics and distinctive performances of the modern circus. In sixteen commissioned essays, it covers the origins in commercial equestrian performance during the late-eighteenth century to contemporary inflections of circus arts in major international festivals, educational environments, and social justice settings. 

Gillian Arrighi is Associate Professor in Drama (Honorary) at the University of Newcastle. She has held visiting fellowships at the Ransom Centre for the Humanities (University of Texas), the Harvard Theatre Collection, and the National Library of Australia. Her research interests are in circus studies, popular entertainments, acting theories and practices. She is the author of The FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus: spectacle, identity and nationhood at the Australian Circus (2015) and is currently finishing her next research book titled Pinafore, Prodigies and Precocities: child actors on popular stages 1879-1914.  

Jim Davis is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick. His major research interest is in nineteenth-century British theatre and his most recent books are Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England (2015 – winner of the 2017 David Bradby Award), theatre & entertainment (2016), and Volume II of a two-volume edition of nineteenth-century dramatizations of Dickens (Oxford, 2017). He is also an editor of Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film. Currently, he is leading an AHRC-funded project on Theatre and Visual Culture in nineteenth-century Britain.