Rosa Appignanesi

Thesis title: "Touching, Imagination, Imitation": Hypnosis in Drama, 1870-1914

My research explores the intersection of theatrical performance and clinical studies on hypnotic states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on medical texts in parellel to discourses on the function and theory of acting, I use hypnosis as a lens for exploring the depiction of the public woman's body, colonial anxieties of the (often Jewish) racial other, and the problem of free will. 

Figures considered are Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, August Strindberg, Jean Martin Charcot, Sigmund Freud, George Du Maurier, Bram Stoker, Henry Irving, Mary Shaw 

Publications

Appignanesi, Rosa. Review of Selling Sexual Knowledge: Medical Publishing and Obscenity in Victorian Britain, by Sarah Bull. Victorian Review, vol. 51 no. 2, 2025, p. 318-321. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2025.a993457.

Supervisor: Ankhi Mukherjee