Dr D.J. Hopkins: Guest Lecture
Scholars vs Superfans: Responding to the Challenges of Immersive Theater Research
Monday, May 13
Galbraith Hall 254
In this talk, D.J. Hopkins reflects on over a decade of fieldwork at Sleep No More, Punchdrunk’s sprawling immersive adaptation of Macbeth — the subject of his recent book. Hopkins argues that immersive theatre presents unique challenges for scholarship, calling for new historiographic approaches attentive to embodied spectatorship and digital research methodologies. Hopkins’s talk proposes alternative research practices with value to scholars across theatre history and performance studies, drawing on digital humanities, media historiography, and phenomenology.
Dr. D.J. Hopkins is a Professor at San Diego State University, where he is the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning. He is the immediate past Director of the SDSU School of Theatre, Television, and Film. Hopkins is a scholar whose research interests include Shakespeare in Performance (including adaptations for film, theatre, and VR) and an academic administrator who has held leadership positions on campus and in the field. His book Sleep No More and the Discourses of Shakespeare Performance (Jan. 2024) is available from Cambridge University Press Hopkins’s book City / Stage / Globe: Performance and Space in Shakespeare’s London (2008) is published by Routledge. Hopkins is the co-editor of the collection of scholarly articles Performance and the Global City (Palgrave 2012, paperback 2015). This volume follows a previous collection of original scholarship, Performance and the City (Palgrave 2009). In 2016, these collections received the ATHE Award for Excellence in Editing. Hopkins’s scholarship has appeared in journals including TheatreForum, Theatr