
Dr Kate Holmes
PhD, MA, BA (Hons)
Expertise
Current positions
Research Support Librarian
Library Services
Contact
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Research interests
I currently work at the University of Bristol as an Open Access Advocacy Research Support Librarian. In this role, I help researchers to understand the importance of Open Access to research culture and their obligations with regard to REF and funder requirements.
I draw on my background as a researcher who is fascinated by what it means to experience the world through our bodies. I have done this by exploring popular entertainments as physical, sensory and intellectual experiences.
My research into the history of aerial performance demonstrates how our understanding of a moving body is culturally constructed. It is informed by my own amateur aerial practice and is driven by a desire to understand history and what that history might reveal about the form itself. My experience of practice helps me to reconstruct and understand what it might be like to experience past aerial acts and to consider what the cultural implications of past aerialists' movements might mean.
Having conducted significant archival research and worked on short-term projects in archives, such as the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, I have an interest in the embodied experiences archives inspire.
More recently, my interest in embodiment and the body-mind benefits of movemtn and pleasure have led me to become interested in the potential mental health benefits of watching physically dynamic performance and archival research.
Publications
Selected publications
30/10/2021Female Aerialists in the 1920s and Early 1930s
Female Aerialists in the 1920s and Early 1930s
Establishing the New York Hippodrome as an Intrinsically ‘American’ Entertainment Venue Through Publicity & A Yankee Circus on Mars’s Performance Practice
Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film
Exhibition curation as practice-as-research performance historiography
Studies in Theatre and Performance
Celestial Bodies in a Viscous Sky
Performance Research
Recent publications
11/04/2024Working Paper No 6: Exploring Research Transparency, Positionality and Reproducibility
Gifford [née Stroud], Eleanor Rose [Nell]
Establishing the New York Hippodrome as an Intrinsically ‘American’ Entertainment Venue Through Publicity & A Yankee Circus on Mars’s Performance Practice
Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film
Experiencing Léotard’s Sensational Body
Journal of Victorian Culture
Celestial Bodies in a Viscous Sky
Performance Research