Prof. Richard C. Beacham
School of Theatre Studies
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
UK

Professor Richard Beacham, a native of Virginia, holds a personal chair in the School of Theatre Studies. He has also taught as a visiting professor at Yale and the University of Califoria, and worked as a Resident Scholar at the J. Paul Getty Museum in California, where he oversaw professional productions of ancient plays, based upon his research. He is an authority on ancient theatre, and has written two major studies of theatre and spectacles in ancient Rome: The Roman Theatre and Its Audience (Harvard Press), and Spectacle Entertainments of Early Imperial Rome (Yale Press).

Professor Beacham is also the English language authority on the work of the early twentieth century theatre designer and visionary theoretician, Adolphe Appia, on whom he has published four books, and numerous articles, including Adolphe Appia, Theatre Artist (Cambridge Press), Adolphe Appia: Texts on Theatre, Adolphe Appia, Artist and Visionary (Gordon and Breach).

He is currently conducting leading research in the application of advanced information technology, and in particular the use of Virtual Reality, to the research and teaching of historic theatre sites and stage setting.

This work has been supported by the Heritage Division of the Council of Europe, and in addition, Prof. Beacham recently secured a major conservation grant from the Getty Trust, arising from this work, which has also received support from a wide variety of international funding bodies.

Prof. Beacham heads the recently completed million pound EC-sponsored THEATRON project (Theatre History in Europe: Architectural and Texual Resources Online), which is a consortium of 8 European academic and commercial partners, who are creating an advanced multi-media teaching and research module documenting the history of European theatre. This module uses a virtual reality interface to access a great many 3D architectural models of major European historic theatres linked to supporting textual and graphic databases.