Date: Saturday 16 February 2008
Time: 10.00 - 19.00
Venue: Judith E Wilson Drama Studio, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, West Road, Cambridge

Sarah Kane's plays are performed all over the world; books and articles on her work are starting to appear; she is a standard reference for contemporary theatre historians and young theatre makers. But which Sarah Kane do these histories construct? What aspects of her work have we forgotten, obscured or denied? What are the continuities and discontinuities between Kane, her predecessors and her contemporaries? Thirteen years on from Blasted's debut at the Royal Court, this conference was an opportunity to revisit Kane's work and place it in a new critical light.

The conference was framed by two keynote contributions from Professor Elaine Aston (University of Lancaster) on 'Re-viewing Kane' and Dr Chris Megson (Royal Holloway, University of London) on 'Sarah Kane and the Politics of Identity'.

An international array of scholars, including Mireia Aragay, Brenda Foley, Helen Iball, David Pattie, Frances Piper, Duska Radosavljevic, Graham Saunders, and Lián Sifuentes, presented papers on topics including:

Kane and Love
Kane and Melancholy
Queer Kane
Kane and the Archive
Kane and Identity
Kane & Global Politics
European Kane
Kane and the Critics
Kane and Tragedy
Kane and Apocalypse


The conference was jointly organised by the University of Cambridge, Royal Holloway and Anglia Ruskin University.

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