Caro Pirri, "Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England: Stages of Unsettlement" (Oxford UP, 2025)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Aug 10, 2026 · 50m

Today’s guest, Caro Pirri, is the author of Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England: Stages of Unsettlement (Oxford University Press, 2025). This book explores how early modern colonial travel writing informed the London theater’s spatial and placemaking conventions. It suggests that what the stage found most compelling about narratives of colonial settlement was their failure to claim interpretive control over unfamiliar places and people. The book goes on to link colonial misreadings of places and people to theatrical strategies for staging disorientation, which Pirri…