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Roberta Barker

Roberta Barker Profile Photo

Roberta Barker is a member of the Joint Faculty of King’s College, London, where she is Professor of Theatre teaching in the Foundation Year and Early Modern Studies programs, and Dalhousie University, Halifax Nova Scotia, where she teaches Theatre in the Fountain School of Performing Arts. Her research interests centre upon the relationship between performance and the social construction of identity and has explored such topics as the representation of gender and class in early modern tragedy, the early modern careers and modern afterlives of Shakespeare’s boy players, and (most recently) the role played by the performance of illness on the nineteenth-century stage in the evolution of realist style. She is also a theatre and opera director.

Consent and Other Big Questions in ‘Measure for Measure’: A Conversation with Roberta Barker
March 22, 2026

Consent and Other Big Questions in ‘Measure for Measure’: A Conversation with Roberta Barker

Episode 207: It was just about this time last year I talked to Roberta Barker about her work on the boy actors of the Elizabethan period and she mentioned at the time that she was then working on a new edition of ‘Measure for...
Boy Actors: A Conversation with Roberta Barker
Feb. 10, 2025

Boy Actors: A Conversation with Roberta Barker

In the third part of this series of guest episodes before we get back to continuing the journey through the Shakespeare and Jonson cannon, we are going deep into the world of the renaissance period boy actors, or perhaps, as ...