Tom Nicholas

The first pilot to my Essay Tips series! I share my method for reading and understanding a journal article or paper quickly and efficiently including how to take good, concise notes and remember useful citations.

Arthur Miller uses the past and present to incredible dramatic effect in Death of a Salesman, All My Sons and many of his other plays. Think about how to use these skills in your own writing by learning from the master.

Welcome to the fifth of my PhD vlogs. Follow my week as a PhD Student in Theatre and Drama at the University of Exeter. Thesis writing, research meetings and field work. As well as a couple of theatre workshops and rehearsals.

My second essay tips video. Conducting a comprehensive literature review is an important part of any research project. Here are my tips for how to use Google Scholar effectively to quickly and easily find the academic papers, journal articles or books you need to write that essay or complete that dissertation.

Ibsen's A Doll's House and An Enemy of the People both engage with politics in intelligent and mature ways, avoiding agitprop-style polemicism and overt persuasion.

I started my PhD a little over six months ago and wanted to share some of the lessons I've learnt from that experience so far in order to allow anyone who may be starting a research degree, masters or undergraduate course might be able to get a headstart and learn from my mistakes!

In Blasted, 4.48 Psychosis and Cleansed, Sarah Kane uses extreme imagery within her stage plays. In analysing the deep meaning of her work, however, there is far more subtlety in both theme and her use of Derrida's concept of deconstruction.

The Royal Shakespeare Company was, last week, host to Richard Bean's new play The Hypocrite, co-produced with Hull Truck Theatre as part of Hull City of Culture 2017. Directed by Phillip Breen, the play starred Mark Addy and Caroline Quentin in the lead roles.

Some tips for how to conduct interdisciplinary research at PhD, MA or undergraduate degree level. Including how to approach reading papers from a completely new research field, methodology or discipline.

A brief introduction to postdramatic and postmodern theatre as first theorised by Hans Theis Lehmann. The first in a series in which I briefly (and, hopefully, accessibly) introduce some core academic concepts and ideas.

Ask most people what they think of when they think of theatre and they'll probably point you towards Les Miserables, Wicked, The Lion King or Hamilton. In other words, musicals. But these aren't just musicals, these are megamusicals.

I recently saw Marianne Elliott's production of Angels in America by Tony Kushner as part of the NTLive broadcast from the National Theatre. Both Part One: Millenium Approaches and Part Two: Perestroika totally captivated me and, as such, I wanted to do a video essay reflecting on it.

Essay Tips is a new series I'm going to be putting out every so often packed with academic essay writing tips and research advice. In this first episode, I look at how to start an essay with a hook. How can you grab your reader and make them pay attention to your essay?

In this introduction to Gramsci and his neomarxist theory of hegemony, in particular cultural hegemony, I explore this concept which has been hugely influential in contemporary social theory, political theory and cultural theory.

Using my own PhD Application and Research Proposal as an example, I explore how to write a research proposal including structure, context, methodology and compiling an indicative bibliography.

Follow a day in the life of a PhD Student as I begin my week of PhD vlogs. My aim is to record one video from Monday to Friday this week, releasing them two days later (Wednesday - Sunday) to give you a full insight into a week as a PhD student and a broader look at postgrad PhD student life in general.

In which I try to understand some weird academic books and struggle with the isolation of working from home.

Day Three! In which I struggle to understand de Certeau and his masterwork The Practice of Everyday Life, pop to the public library and go for a run!

Day four! In which I take a tiny break from PhD life to think about writing scripts and, more specifically, writing my next play.

The last in my week of daily phd student vlogs in which I go to what must be one of the coolest libraries in the world and make a breakthrough in understanding some tough theory.

This week, a combination of theatre vlog and PhD vlog as I pick out my top 5 theatre books for theatre students, theatre nerds and anyone with an interest in drama who wishes to develop a better understanding of theatre and get ahead in their drama class at university, drama school or elsewhere.

Although originating in the dramatic theatre or narrative theatre, dramaturgy is an increasingly useful notion for describing the affective journey an audience goes on while watching a play or performance.

Often it would be easier to have complex theories simply explained to us. But we don't always have that choice. In this episode of Essay Tips I elaborate on some methods for understanding complex theory and theories in the Humanities.

In today's What the Theory?, I take a look social class looking at both Karl Marx's theory of class as well as Pierre Bourdieu, cultural capital and more societally rooted approaches to class in the twenty-first century.

I've been preparing for PhD upgrade process recently as well as having my new play performed in Exeter which is why I've been a little slow at uploading stuff.

In this episode of What the Theory, an introduction to semiotics, in particular the approaches of linguists and semioticians Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce.

Want to improve your paragraph structure for academic writing? In this video, I suggest 5 tips for writing paragraphs that will make your essay concise, clear and easy to read.

Roland Barthes' From Work to Text is a seminal essay which lays out why, in the humanities, we have come to refer to pieces of literature, films and many other things using the catch-all term "text". Because, we refer a lot to reading a text or interpreting a text. But what do we mean when talk about a literary text? The use of the term text in English Literature and literary studies might seem fairly straight-forward, but, across the wider humanities, we also often hear references to artistic texts, filmic texts and performance texts.