Cast Member Research Articles

Social Representation of Mental Health Disorders in the Italian Big Brother VIP Edition

Despite the revolutionary impact of new media, television remains a socially shared reference point for media functions, e.g., information, entertainment, and hybridized genres. Through its simplified knowledge and scripts, television reduces cognitive asymmetry between experts and the public on general and specific topics, thus having a critical role in constructing social representations. This work examines two (apparently) distant realities, i.e., mental health as a fundamental aspect of public health and popular and “light” entertainment formats like reality shows. In the past, researchers investigated media representation of mental illness in general terms alongside other types of programs, e.g., coming-of-age, dramedy television series, and children’s television programs. This study examines how depression is discursively constructed and socially represented in a case that shook the Italian public opinion, i.e., a Big Brother VIP cast member with depression symptoms. The critical discourse analysis, focusing on positioning and representations about depression, enabled us to emphasize that (1) knowledge about depression is poorly defined and participants’ reactions are mostly immature and clumsy, and (2) mass media can play an essential role in creating more mindful and complete knowledge about mental health.

If it happened, he was there

The Asian American Broadway musical continues to be a limited category in which many of its most commercially successful titles have histories mired in stereotype, mockery and erasure. Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Pacific Overtures, however, stands apart from most other Broadway musicals written about the Asian and Asian American experience. The positioning of an Asian narrative in a serious and legitimate manner, the effort to incorporate Japanese aesthetic authenticity and the resolve to cast all Asian American talent were central to the creation of Pacific Overtures and were historical firsts for the Broadway stage. Stamped with Sondheim’s incomparable quality seal, Pacific Overtures initiated a new and necessary step towards Asian American Broadway inclusivity. But the show’s original Broadway run in 1976 was unsuccessful, both critically and commercially, and closed after 193 regular performances. In 2004, a highly anticipated Broadway revival gave the New York theatre world a chance to revisit Pacific Overtures. The revival production also offered a company of Asian American actors, whose community had historically been sidelined on Broadway, the opportunity to deliver a high-profile show about the Asian experience that resisted clichéd gestures of Asian-ness. In this article, I share my personal recollections of my time with Pacific Overtures as a cast member of the 2004 Broadway revival and reflect upon the production as it pertains to a grander collective memory of the Asian American Broadway experience. Cautiously optimistic about the critical and commercial outcome of this new production, our 2004 Pacific Overtures cast took great comfort in an ever-present Sondheim, whose constant proximity and participation during the run of the show served as a reminder that even this lesser-known Sondheim piece is still a Sondheim masterpiece.

The Audio Describer As Cast Member

NOTE: This abstract is based on a professional audio description experiment for two productions at Arena Stage in Washington, DC, USA. It does not follow a traditional research model but is rather a report of practical work in the field of live audio description for theatre. Live audio description can be made cost-effectively available at each performance of a performing arts production. This chapter will demonstrate how it is possible to create accessibility for blind theater-goers on a par with sighted audience members. Similarly, multiple language and sign interpretation can be made available at all performances of an event. In 1981, a formal audio description service—the world’s first—was begun under the leadership of a blind woman at The Metropolitan Washington Ear, a radio-reading service based in Washington, DC. Radio reading services still exist throughout the United States with the participation of volunteer readers; I began working as a volunteer reader at The Ear in 1972 and was proud to be a founding member of its audio description service. Radio reading services are heavily dependent on volunteers and The Ear’s audio description service was also structured around voluntary contributions of time and effort. Cognizant of the limits on the times of people who often maintain full-time employment elsewhere, audio description was conceived as a service that would be offered at only two performances of a theatrical run and preparation for the audio described performances was based on the observation of only two or three performances early in the run. It was understood that optimally audio description would be prepared with more in-depth observation of the theatrical event, even during rehearsals, and that audio described should be offered at every performance in the run of a show. But the limitation of the volunteer structure prohibited that arrangement. The proliferation of audio description for live theatrical events in the United States is based on this volunteer, limited preview/two-described-performances model. With support from the D.C. Aid Association for the Blind, the Audio Description Project of the American Council of the Blind proposed a more expansive audio description arrangement for two productions again at Arena Stage. We collaborated with Arena on the experiment: an audio describer attended rehearsals for each production, met with the stage director, actors, the designers (scenic, costumes, lighting, sound) and developed an audio description script throughout the three-week rehearsal period. The script was then available for that same describer to voice at every performance beginning with opening night and with, of course, an eye on stage action as minor changes in action could occur from performance to performance. The describer, essentially, was a “cast member”, attending every rehearsal and performance. The arrangement had two benefits over the traditional model of audio description development for live performance: time was available to carefully observe the theatrical process and construct descriptive language that was more thorough and considered; and people desiring the service could attend any performance with no advance notice and be assured of access to the visual aspects of the production. Other innovations included Braille and large-print programs, models of the set and props in the lobby, and a tactile “scrapbook” of costume pieces. It was gratifying to note that attendance for the productions by people using audio description tripled over levels experienced at Arena using the traditional volunteer model.

‘Don’t Be Disrespectful, Young ‘Un!’: Grandpa Jones and Age Masquerade in Country Music

ABSTRACT From the 1930s to 1950s, dozens of country musicians ‘aged-up’ by drawing on wrinkles, wearing gray wigs, and behaving like ‘old-timers’. Taking as its case study the Kentuckian musician and radio entertainer Louis Marshall ‘Grandpa’ Jones, this article unpacks the phenomenon of age masquerade in mid-twentieth-century country music. Although best remembered as a cast member of the early 1970s CBS series Hee Haw, Jones first started his career as ‘Grandpa’ in the 1930s, when he was still in his twenties. This article asks what Grandpa Jones, and the wider age masquerade phenomenon, reveal about the nation’s hopes and fears in the years between the Great Depression and the beginning of the Cold War. In the process, this article argues that Jones and other fake elders operating in early country music draw attention to the diverse theatrical, technological, commercial, and demographic influences on country music’s development; challenge our ideas about the importance of ‘authenticity’ to the genre; and, more broadly, demonstrate how country music history can provide new perspectives on some of the period’s old-age politics and gender, class, and race dynamics.

Braiding Self into Social: Remembering Bob McGrath

In this autoethnographic reflection, I examine the process of braiding self into social, through an exploration of learning about the death of Sesame Street cast member Bob McGrath while scrolling morning news headlines. I hope this reflection encourages others to think about media in everyday life.

“Special Feature: The Achievements of John Dennis,” ed. Claude Willan. 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, ed. Kevin L. Cope

“Special Feature: The Achievements of John Dennis,” ed. Claude Willan. <i>1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, ed. Kevin L. Cope</i>

Our Town, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington, DC

<i>Our Town</i>, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington, DC

“You Gotta Accentuate the Positive”: Japanese American Affirmation and Resilience in The Camp Dance: The Music and the Memories

“You Gotta Accentuate the Positive”: Japanese American Affirmation and Resilience in <i>The Camp Dance: The Music and the Memories</i>

Deep Learning of Latent Edge Types from Relational Data

Many relational datasets, including relational databases, feature links of different types (e.g., actors act in movies, users rate movies), known as multi-relational, heterogeneous, or multi-layer graphs. Edge types/graph layers are often incompletely labeled. For example, IMDb lists Tom Cruise as a cast member of Mission Impossible, but not as its star. Inferring latent layers is useful for relational prediction tasks (e.g. predict Tom Cruise’s salary or his presence in other movies). This paper describes a Latent Layer Generative Framework - LLGF that extends graph encoder-decoder architectures to include latent layers. The decoder treats the observed edge type signalas a linear combination of latent layers. The encoder infers parallel node representations, one for each latent layer. We evaluate our proposed framework on six benchmark graph learning datasets. Qualitative evidence indicates that LLGF recovers ground truth layers well. For link prediction as a downstream task, we find that extending Variational Graph Auto-Encoders with LLGF increases link prediction accuracy compared to state-of-theart graph Variational Auto-Encoders (up to 6% AUC depending on the dataset).

Navigating Black Identity and White Desire: Seven-Eleven and the 1920s Crossover Musical Comedy

Navigating Black Identity and White Desire: <i>Seven-Eleven</i> and the 1920s Crossover Musical Comedy

In Memoriam: Joan Copeland 1922–2022

Other| April 01 2022 In Memoriam: Joan Copeland 1922–2022 The Arthur Miller Journal (2022) 17 (1): 1–3. https://doi.org/10.5325/arthmillj.17.1.0001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation In Memoriam: Joan Copeland 1922–2022. The Arthur Miller Journal 1 April 2022; 17 (1): 1–3. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/arthmillj.17.1.0001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe Arthur Miller Journal Search Advanced Search Acclaimed stage, film, and television actress Joan Copeland, the sister of Arthur Miller, passed away in her home in Manhattan on January 4, 2022, just six months short of her 100th birthday.Copeland’s career spanned seven decades. She made her stage debut in Romeo and Juliet in 1945 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and played Desdemona in Othello the following year. She was one of the original members of the Actor’s Studio. She made her Broadway debut in Sundown Beach in 1948, and the following year she was an original cast member in Sidney Kingsley’s Detective Story. Among other Broadway appearances, she played opposite Danny Kaye in Richard Rodgers’s Two by Two and she starred as Vera in the 1977 revival of Pal Joey, for which she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award as Outstanding Actress in a Musical. One reviewer wrote: “Watching Joan Copeland singing... You do not currently have access to this content.

Examining the Transition of Contemporary Managers Becomes Senior Leaders and Eventually Moves On

The crisis of educational leadership has motivated so much debate and research in recent times in the field of educational administration. Most school leaders have not been trained in the art of educational management and leadership. It has been presumed that anyone who receives a bachelor’s degree in education or a postgraduate diploma in education through training can automatically become a head teacher or principal. That explains why in developing as well as developed countries, school managers and leaders face a lot of challenges. This article seeks to create a link between the career development of senior leadership and the different models proposed by scholars like Day and Bakioglu, Gronn, Wakins and Robbins. The researchers hope to develop strategies that can groom educational managers to assume senior leadership positions. The most influential agents of socialization by Lenka and Vandana, Gupta, Krishnan, Homan & Youngman and Ebot Ashu that enhance educational leadership development have been explored to give this work some serious focus. The primary agent of socialization considered here is the family which is the nucleus of society. The secondary agents of socialization include the schools, peer groups, the churches, work groups, communities, mass medium, social groups and the government. Focusing on Watkins’ seven seismic shifts that transit from specialist to generalist, analyst to the integrator, tactician to strategist, bricklayer to architect, problem solver to agenda setter, warrior to diplomat and supporting cast member to lead role, the researchers argue that school managers can transit to the level of senior leaders and continue to influence school administration in many positive ways. Educational leaders should take their ongoing career development seriously if they are to become relevant in contemporary society. The methodology used in this work is very apt. Based on the field experiences of school administrators, the researchers are able to arrive at findings that support the literature that has been gathered. They are able to explore the career life of educational leaders and identify factors which influence them to become senior leaders and move on as encompassed in the first three phases of Gronn’s and Ribbins’ models, with exceptional three new sub-phases within the accession phase. In all, the study agrees with the general principles of Ribbins’ model rather than the previous work of Day & Bakioglu’s and Gronn’s, who suggest disenchantment and divestiture as inevitable final phases in the career lives of senior leaders. Therefore, Ribbins’ theoretical frame-work of education leadership can be useful in interpreting the link between the career developments of contemporary senior leaders. This study concludes that socialization occurs throughout our life, but some of the most important socialization that occurs during that phase of our lives is the family, school, peers, church, mass media, community, workplace and social group. Therefore, Watkins’ contributions to administration, management and leadership can be used to educate contemporary educational managers and senior leaders in contemporary society.

Tug of War: Social Media, Cancel Culture, and Diversity for Girls and The 100

Hate the most recent season of a television show? Create a viral petition! Better yet, find an old tweet of a cast member to publicly shame them. These are examples of audience participation and expectations when it comes to television. Audiences react to several types of fiction, but this article mostly focuses on the impacts of television shows and audience reception. Analyzing audience and critical reception of certain TV shows may reveal motivations for subsequent creative decisions by the creators. On shows like Roseanne, audience reception has influenced decisions concerning creative control. Audience demands help sway the market and have opened up diversity initiatives in speculative media. The theoretical base for this article is formed from reception theoryand primary research of Twitter posts. To further explore the phenomenon of audience sway over artistic ownership, two television shows, Girlsand The 100, will be examined in context with audience and critical reception, cancelculture, and diversity initiatives across media.

The Seven Deadly Sins, by Wesley Savick, Micaleen Rodgers, and Sydney Grant

The Seven Deadly Sins, by Wesley Savick, Micaleen Rodgers, and Sydney Grant

The Ordinary Mystique And US Weekly's Heyday

The Ordinary Mystique And US Weekly's Heyday Elizabeth Meyers Hendrickson (bio) Extraordinarily Ordinary: Us Weekly and the Rise of Reality Television Celebrity. Erin A. Meyers. Rutgers University Press, 2020. 145 pp. $27.95 paperback. These days, it seems almost quaint to imagine that there was a time before smartphones and social media, when consumers would purchase celebrity magazines just so they could peek behind the glamorous curtain into a celebrity's seemingly nonmediated life. But during the first decade of the twenty-first century, Us Weekly's print issues served exactly that purpose. The magazine, which dominated the celebrity-magazine market, was known for an editorial style and tone that mixed ordinary and extraordinary discourses and perpetuated a new type of star—reality-television performers. In Extraordinarily Ordinary: Us Weekly and the Rise of Reality Television Celebrity, Erin A. Meyers takes a critical approach in placing the magazine's content within American cultural contexts. The introduction establishes relevant tie-ins with today's use of social media for public performance, and the book's core concepts link pre-social media celebrity-magazine foci to the current proliferation of personal branding vis-à-vis Instagram and other social platforms. Perhaps drawing on her perspective as coeditor of Celebrity Studies, Meyers keenly outlines the parallels between reality television, celebrity magazines, and Instagram posts—each successfully using the guise of authenticity to distribute mediated presentational performances of everyday life, crafted to gain optimal cultural attention and value. The data source is a ten-year corpus, starting in 2000, of Us Weekly print issues—archived, organized, and inductively coded. Using qualitative [End Page 113] research soft ware, Meyers establishes thematic shifts that recast certain reality-show cast members as reality celebrities and, ultimately, extraordinarily ordinary celebrities. The book charts this progression against the backdrop of some unwavering constants in the coverage, such as support for patriarchal norms and consumerist lifestyles, which do not preclude the shattering of traditional notions of fame. The book's structure is relatively uncomplicated: four building-block chapters, plus an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter 1 establishes the notions of ordinary or private self and extraordinary or public self within conventional stardom scholarship. The chapter also introduces its analysis framework, which includes three forms of labor: creative labor, labor of ordinariness, and celebrity-lifestyle labor. This triad forms a lens to study the construction of celebrity status, the mythologization of meritocracy, and the reinforcement of normative identities in the magazine's coverage. Chapter 2 examines how Us Weekly used the labor of ordinariness to achieve goals crucial to its profitability—such as the "growing" of celebrities through coverage of "ordinary" reality-television cast members. Chapter 3 discusses the celebrity-lifestyle labor needed to establish the transition from an ordinary to an extraordinary celebrity. To that end, the magazine might feature photos of an "ordinary" cast member doing "extraordinary" things, such as walking down a red carpet or showcasing their home. As such coverage is usually relegated to celebrities, its use converts the ordinary to the extraordinary. Chapter 4 illustrates this labor in a case study of reality-television star Lauren Conrad's transformation, offering insights into the below-the-surface dynamics that established Conrad as a bona fide celebrity and, now, a lifestyle brand. But it is the concluding chapter that drives home the true relevance of this book, by positioning Us Weekly within the annals of contemporary popular culture. It correctly recognizes its influence on today's social media celebrities (or rather, microcelebrities) and explicates the oft enblurred lines negotiated in today's perpetually selfie- loving, public- facing behavior. The conclusion also spotlights the centrality of industry shifts—including Us Weekly's sale to media mogul and Trump supporter David Pecker in 2017—to the magazine's ideological objectives. This text, while relatively slim in page count compared to other books about celebrity culture, is outstandingly dense with academic splendor. The author's previous research about the relationship between Us Weekly and gossip blogs clearly informs the book, as she confidently and competently [End Page 114] weaves together interdisciplinary arguments that allow readers a nuanced and contextual understanding. Its intended audience includes scholars and students in fields such...

Casting Allusions

&#x0D; The modest philosophical literature on allusion focuses on descriptive issues concerning literary examples, and thus tends to neglect both allusions in other media and normative concerns about allusions in general. In this paper I will help fill both gaps through an analysis of three different cases of what I call casting allusions, which depend on the audience’s recognition that a certain cast member was also in the cast of a different work. These cases vary greatly in aesthetic merit, and this is best explained via two dimensions of allusive value: richness (given the medium) and dynamic engagement. All else being equal, an allusion will be more aesthetically pleasing when it relies on a wider variety of medium-relevant channels or prompts less passive, more evolving audience response. Such an account finds further support in elaborate cinematic examples, such as the tapestry of allusions to Bruce Lee in the Kill Bill films.&#x0D;

The Crucible

The Crucible

Soft Power: (Auto)ethnography, Racial Affect, and Dramaturgical Critique

Soft Power: (Auto)ethnography, Racial Affect, and Dramaturgical Critique Dorinne Kondo (bio) Soft Power, Ahmanson Theater, Los Angeles, 05 16– 06 10, 2018; Curran Theater, San Francisco, 06 20– 07 8, 2018. Soft Power, a spectacular, genre-bending "play with a musical," opened on May 16, 2018, at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles, as the culmination of Center Theatre Group's fiftieth anniversary season. A co-production with LA's East West Players, the longest continuously running theater of color in the United States, and San Francisco's Curran Theater, Soft Powermoved to the Curran on June 20, 2018, for a three-week run and will move to New York in the fall of 2019. The creative team includes David Henry Hwang, the premier Asian American dramatist (book and lyrics), Jeanine Tesori, the composer of celebrated musicals including Fun Homeand Caroline, or Change, the director Leigh Silverman (long-time collaborator with Hwang), and the choreographer Sam Pinkleton. Over-the-top staging, dazzling acting, singing, and dancing from a majority Asian American cast, sumptuous music by the twenty-two-piece orchestra, and witty metatheatricality that nonetheless goes straight to the heart are on full display in Soft Power. Soft Powertakes as a point of departure Joseph Nye's concept of geopolitical power that exceeds military force or economic dominance. Soft power is the cultural and ideological influence circulated through cultural products such as film, television, sports, music, and theater, constituting a crucial register of global hegemony. Nye offers a highly gendered and sexualized definition: "the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It arises from the attractiveness of a country's culture, political ideals, and policies. … Seduction is always more effective than coercion, and many values like democracy, human rights, and individual opportunities are deeply seductive." 1The play/musical Soft Poweruses the registers of song, dance, and the transnational, interracial romance between the candidate Hillary Clinton and the Chinese film executive Xue Xing to perform the "seductiveness" of soft power. Hwang's play/musical asks, what would happen if mainstream [End Page 265]America's worst nightmare were realized, and China became the preeminent global superpower after the decline of the US nation-state in the wake of the 2016 election? We see the US from "another point of view," as Xue convinces US politicians to lay down their guns and to join the community of nations, a vision he calls the New Silk Road. The majority Asian American cast vividly challenges the whiteness of mainstream theater. We are still in a moment when Asian Americans onstage or backstage are too few. 2Of all minoritarian theater actors, Asian Americans experienced the sharpest decline in representation from the previous season on New York City stages, accounting for only 4 percent of the 35 percent of roles played by African American, Latinx, Middle Eastern / North African (MENA), American Indian, and disabled performers. 3Conrad Ricamora (Oliver, the gay Asian American hacker from How to Get Away with Murder, Lun Tha in the 2015 revival of The King and I, and Ninoy Aquino in David Byrne's musical Here Lies Love) is Xue; Alyse Alan Louis (the only white cast member) plays Hillary; Francis Jue, veteran of many of Hwang's productions, performs the eponymous role of DHH, stand-in for the playwright. An ensemble of young, talented Asian American singers/dancers/actors embody multiple roles: donning blond wigs, they become senators, campaign staff, sketchy con artists on Hollywood Boulevard, thus turning the tables on yellowface performance. This was one of Soft Power's greatest pleasures. When has theater, especially mainstream musical theater, seen whiteness so sharply satirized? I have written of what I call racial affect, which enlivens some and leaches life energy from others. 4Too often, minoritarian subjects who attend performances of "high culture" are subjected to what I call "affective violence," when our roundedness and complexity are flattened through stereotype, marginalization, erasure. In stark contrast, for me and my companions, Soft Powerwas among the rare, life-giving theatrical experiences that theater lovers crave. Inspiring a sense of liveliness and uplift assumes a particular political urgency in...

Birds of a Feather

At Disney World, the name tags of Cast Members (as they like to call themselves) are magical. I remember laying eyes on these name tags on a family vacation and thinking, in a flash, that Walt Disney was a psychological genius. Why? Well, for one thing, right off the bat, my family was on a first-name basis with every Cast Member we met. This subtle cue was one a way for Walt to make the millions of Disney World visitors—including us—feel at home. Even better, right under their first name, printed in bold, capital letters, was each Cast Member's hometown or college. This small detail had the effect of turning a total stranger into a real person, with a childhood and a life story. What's more, it led effortlessly to connections like these: “Detroit! My Aunt Sue lived near there. Do you know a little town called Pinckney?” In other words, the name tags of Disney Cast Members are, effectively, a social belonging intervention. Because a big part of social belonging is feeling like you have something in common with the people around you.

Mad‐Doctors in the Dock:. Defending the Diagnosis, 1760–1913 Joel Peter Eigen. Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press (2016) 224pp. £35.97hb ISBN 9781421420486

The role of ‘Mad-Doctors’, alienists, criminal anthropologists, criminal psychologists, criminalists, psychiatrists and psychiatry in the courts, and their influence on the rule of law have throughout the last 40–50 years accumulated quite a large literature in history, law and the social sciences. The modern metamorphosis of thought on knowing right from wrong, the development of medical diagnoses from labels such as moral insanity and moral epilepsy to modern-day psychopathy have attracted the interest of historians, criminologists, and legal scholars. This is a fruitful interdisciplinary field, yet also, at times, quite a politically-contentious research area. Joel Peter Eigen's Mad-Doctors in the Dock is the final volume of a trilogy that started with the 1995 publication of Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad-Doctors in the English Court (Eigen 1995). The focus of his latest book is on the emergence of the diagnosis homicidal mania and its reception (see especially Chapters 5 and 6), but also more generally concerns the rise of forensic psychiatry. Since the publication of Foucault's Madness and Civilization, much scholarly attention and debate has been devoted to the history of notions and treatment of insanity, but rarely have scholars, whether sympathetic or critical, looked with any sustained concern beyond the narrow world of medical authorities. The related study of insanity in law has similarly confined its purview to leading cases, such as McNaughten's. This estimable book breaks new ground by looking outside the medical realm and beyond major cases. (pp.375–6) The ability to look at the court and legal process without having too myopic a focus on medical authorities remains one of Eigen's most important contributions to this area of research. His impressive work stands as a vital empirical corrective to much literature that fails to clearly provide a balanced presentation of how much power ‘Mad-Doctors’, alienists et al. actually exerted in the courts and on the rule of law. As Eigen puts it, although the ‘Victorian alienist became a regular cast member in the Old Bailey drama … he would have to earn his hour upon the stage’ (p.10). That the testimonies and scientific perspectives of ‘Mad-Doctors’ were often challenged is per se not a novel finding, but Eigen manages to bring out important nuances and presentations of the diverse actors and forces involved in cases of insanity and criminal justice. Eigen's source material covers 994 trials collected in over a 20-year time span, this in contrast to the majority of research which still most often uses examples from singular (or few court) cases. Eigen's Mad-Doctors in the Dock should be compulsory reading for those interested in understanding the development of English insanity defences and trials in the 19th Century especially. It is a pity, however, that he does not explicitly, in this final part of his project, engage more with the role and influence of the psychiatric professions in the courts examined by former researchers in this area. While, in the introduction, he acknowledges the support and influence of scholars such as Nigel South and Andrew Scull (to mention just a couple) and testifies to inspiration from historical sociologists, he abstains from reflecting on the meta-positions which, arguably, exist in the research on the influence of psychiatry in the courts. However, it would be bad form to critique a text for what is absent when there is so much to appraise. Eigen's trilogy will, for a long time, undoubtedly stand as among the most important contributions to the history of insanity trials in English courts. When it comes to what, in this review, is considered lacking, hopefully this is something we will get to look forward to in his later publications.