Roger Clegg

Roger Clegg is Senior Lecturer in Drama Studies at De Montfort University, where his teaching includes Twentieth Century European Drama, Popular Theatre, Pre-texts and Contexts of Drama and Renaissance English Theatre.

Hisresearch is in the politics and practice of Renaissance popular performance and the relationship between the stage and the culture and society which it inhabits. He has researched and written on English jigs from the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, and has also investigated the staging of Singing Simpkin at Shakespeare’s Globe as part of Globe Education’s ‘Winter Playing’ research (2003).

Publications include He’s for a jig or a Tale of Bawdry: Notes on the English stage Jig, with Peter Thomson, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 2009.

Roger is also particularly interested in popular humour, political satire and comic performance, and organises a conference and other events annually under the banner Playing for Laughs: On Comedy in Performance (as part of Dave’s Leicester Comedy Festival) which invites academics and practitioners of comedy to come together to share ideas on just why and how people generate laughter through performance.