Julie Camarda is an Associate Instructional Professor at the University of Chicago and Assistant Editor of the Keats-Shelley Journal. She has published widely on nineteenth-century British literature and culture, most recently contributing an essay on drama to Shelley in Context (Cambridge UP, 2025).
In anticipation of The Romantic Revivals Project’s upcoming dramatic reading of Percy Shelley’s The Cenci, The K-SAA Comms team interviewed Julie Camarda about her involvement in the project. The dramatic reading will take place on Thursday, November 5th, 2026 in partnership with Red Bull Theater.
How did you become involved as a scholarly collaborator on The Romantic Revivals’ production of The Cenci?
My colleague Omar Miranda invited me to participate in the project based on our shared, long-held enthusiasm for The Cenci (and Shelley in general).
How has your research on The Cenci contributed to your work on this project?
Part of my research explores how communication is represented in verse. My writings on The Cenci center on why the heroine, Beatrice, refuses to discuss “what happened” to her even though other characters in the play—and reader-audience members—know that her father sexually assaulted her. So, my work asks whether narrating traumatic events helps the victim or indulges the inquiring listener’s curiosity, especially when that victim exists in a system dominated by tyranny, hypocrisy, and judicial corruption.
In application to the Red Bull Theater event, Beatrice’s resistance to “telling” in favor of poetic metaphor and violent action presents a fascinating challenge to actors, directors, and audience members. How are we to “act” when confronted with the unthinkable? How are actors to act when the play’s key events take place offstage? That the Red Bull Theater is staging a reading, too, will highlight the tension between stage and text: many of Shelley’s contemporaries described The Cenci as “undramatic,” but Shelley attempted to stage the play in his lifetime.
I was interested to read your remarks about the audience’s role in your article "Tortured Logic: Answering to No One in Shelley’s The Cenci.” Do you believe experiencing The Cenci live is necessary to fully, as you write, “viscerally [react] to the text’s poetic power”? Can you speak about the role the audience might play in the upcoming performance of The Cenci?
I’ve never seen The Cenci produced on stage, so I’m very excited how the play’s ethical stakes—where audiences may discover that there is no one right way to “feel” about the play’s events or heroine—may manifest.
I say “may” because, to me, one of the things that makes theater wonderful is its uncertainty. Each performance is new and holds the promise of the unexpected. I look forward, then, to not knowing how the audience will react! I am confident, however, that this collaboration between audience members, actors, and director will provide new insights into Shelley’s verse.
Why do you believe it is important to produce The Cenci at this moment in time?
The Cenci is a remarkably prescient work, and it is capacious in its understanding of political, domestic, and sexual violence. We can recognize affinities between the play’s themes and any given political moment. When I was first writing on The Cenci, for example, Christine Blasey Ford was testifying before Congress against the confirmation of now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. As was the case with Anita Hill, there was no denying Blasey Ford’s bravery in coming out against Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual misconduct. However, as I watched the hearings, I could not help but feel that no one in political power would heed her words, that she would be punished for sharing them, and that Kavanaugh would be confirmed without further investigation.
Today, the rise of fascism is endangering democratic principles and the rule of law across the globe. From its very first scene, The Cenci lays out how tyrants and oligarchs gain traction: otherwise decent people, or go-along to get-along politicians, allow the corrupt and the violent to live outside the law if the offenders can buy their ways out of trouble. When we consider the kinds of stories that dominate our news cycles, The Cenci’s Machiavellian setting may not seem so distant after all.
Worse, this political corruption extends to the abuse of women, minors, and other vulnerable members of society to which our justice systems continue to turn a blind eye. (I am thinking of Jeffrey Epstein and his network, for example, or various other aspiring, elected, or confirmed government officials accused of abominable crimes against women, many of whom have yet to stand trial or even to merit investigation.)
The Cenci therefore demands that we attend to the grim realities that now face us, just as it did of its readers in 1819. More than this, the play begs us to consider what it means to do something in a degraded world, and whether we can judge those who, however misguidedly, attempt to resist oppressive power structures both political and domestic.
Is there anything else you would like us to know about the project?
Please enjoy the show, and be sure to check out future Romantic Revivals projects, too!
