Zak Eastop

Profile

Zak Eastop is currently a doctoral candidate working between Durham University's French and Music departments. Alongside his doctoral studies he has worked as a DU Foundation Fellow, teaching students during the first year of their Arts and Humanities foundation programmes at Durham. He is also a mentor with Oppidan Education, supporting young people with their studies and personal development both in and out of school.

Before beginning his PhD at Durham, Eastop studied for an MRes at the ILCS, funded by the Cassal Bursary for French and Francophone Study. Prior to this, he read French and German at the University of Bristol where he held a Vice-Chancellor’s Music Scholarship and was awarded the Anna Crossman Prize for German upon graduating. While still a Bristol undergraduate, his first journal article – on Giuseppe Verdi’s adaptation of Friedrich Schiller’s Don Karlos – was published in German Life and Letters. 

While his academic background is primarily in modern languages and literatures, he has maintained a keen interest in musicology thanks largely to his work as a freelance trumpet player. Over the years he has performed with  high-profile ensembles, including the English Session Orchestra, Not So Silent Movies, the Locrian Ensemble, and the Bristol Ensemble, as well as several pit orchestras (on and off West End). He was also a BBC Young Musician of the Year brass category finalist in 2016.

His research at the ILCS examines four late 19th-century 'adaptations' of François Rabelais's texts for the Parisian lyric stage, asking how, why, and under what terms Rabelais gained such renewed popularity. What made French writers and composers so keen to adapt Rabelais’s scandalous, salacious, and seriously silly texts? What was it about politically turbulent 19th-century Paris, with its ever-shifting hierarchies of class, cultural value, and genre, that made Rabelais’s socio-culturally subversive books seem so suitable for the sung stage? Who might Rabelais have been to these adapters and what might he have represented? Was he a comic writer, a symbol of patriotism and national unity, or was he something else? How might unpicking and examining 19th-century adaptations of these texts inform our own readings? Might readers and adapters in the 19th-century have seen something there that we’ve now lost? And more broadly, what might all this tell us about the nature of adaptation, imitation, translation, or cultural recreation?  

While attempting to answer these questions (and more), we will encounter dragons, shipwrecks, goblin choirs, distressed damsels, dastardly dukes, and dancing sausages. We will seek out the golden fleece, allocate the apple of discord, flee our fiancées, fall in love, and toast our own temerity with gallons of wine. We will dance with nudist nymphs, engage in merry monastic monkey business, and struggle terribly as we herd flocks of real sheep across our recently electrified and gloriously illuminated stage. We will undermine autocracies and backchat the bourgeoisie, cause a scandal, make a scene, dance with death, and find romance: all to the blasts of brass, the cries of the chorus, and the thunderous applause or acute antipathy of an ever capricious and constantly shifting audience.