Thursday, April 3, 2025
12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Buchanan Tower, Room 997, 1873 East Mall, UBC Vancouver
Or register to attend over Zoom
Abstract:
Dr. Tomkinson will discuss and present on his current book project, titled Adapting Schreber: From Memoir to Multimedia and Beyond. The book project aims to assemble a comprehensive production history of adaptations of Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), spanning theatre, film, radio, opera, sound installations, and various mixed media. Exploring upwards of twenty case studies, the book puts Schreber through a medial prism, critically examining the cultural uses of this figure over time, beginning with Caryl Churchill’s 1972 radio play Schreber’s Nervous Illness. At the same time, it develops a theory of adaptation Dr. Tomkinson calls “madaptation,” which names the process by which mad phenomenologies are encoded within medium-specific tropes and techniques.
Matthew Tomkinson (he/they) is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in CENES at the University of British Columbia. He holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from UBC, specializing in sound and disability art. His monograph with Palgrave Macmillan, titled “Sound and Sense in Contemporary Theatre: Mad Auralities,” critically examines auditory simulations of mental health differences. His current postdoctoral research, titled “Adapting Schreber: From Memoir to Multimedia and Beyond” (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2026) surveys a wide range of multimedia adaptations of Schreber’s memoir over the past fifty years.