Obituary: Professor David Mayer 1928 - 2023

Professor David Mayer

The Department of Drama and Film in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures is saddened to hear of the recent passing of Professor David Mayer, Emeritus and Honorary Research Professor and a foundational member of the Drama department.

Having spent a brief term as Lecturer at the University of Bristol and in the English department at Warwick University, David came to the University of Manchester in 1972. 

He retired in 1996 but continued to lecture across Europe and the US as well as authoring key academic works on theatre, performance and on early film and screen cultures. 

David was co-editor of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film from 2002 to 2008. He was Head of Department from 1991 to 1994 and was the recipient of numerous research grants and awards, receiving the Distinguished Scholar Award, from the American Society for Theatre Research, in 2012.

David’s enthusiasm for and scholarly expertise in early cinema history and practice shaped the original film teaching and research in the Department, as well as the international academic debates on early cinema and its relation to our understanding of theatre and performance, from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century in Europe and the US. 

An avid collector of theatre and film memorabilia, David and his wife Helen Day-Mayer gave generous philanthropic donations to the John Rylands Special Collections at the University of Manchester, as well as to other archives and film related festivals across the globe. 

David was a formidable intellectual, with an acute critical eye and acerbic wit, and he is remembered by those he taught and those whose research he supervised, as a generous, thoughtful and inspiring teacher, and an original and international agenda-setting academic. He will be greatly missed by those knew him at the University of Manchester and by the international scholarly community more widely.