We are delighted to share the news that Shirley Day — who has spoken twice in recent years at the Graham Greene International Festival — has been awarded her PhD by the University of East Anglia for her thesis on Graham Greene and a series of his screen adaptations.
‘I’ve always loved Graham Greene’s novels and, when setting out on the PhD journey, felt I could happily spend six years in Greene’s company, so it seemed like a good fit,’ Shirley tells us. ‘I had also been frustrated when having my own work adapted for the screen and felt Greene might offer me some hints as to how to control the process of adaptation. I soon realised he felt the same frustrations, with perhaps even more justification!’
Her thesis is entitled Graham Greene and Adaptation.
Shirley took a number of adaptations of Greene’s works as case studies, notably the films 21 Days (1940), The Man Within (1947), Brighton Rock (1948) and The Quiet American (1955). Each case study offered different insights into the adaptation process: Greene as an adaptor for hire (21 Days, which he adapted, with Basil Dean, from a 1919 play by John Galsworthy, ‘The First and the Last’); Greene selling the rights to his work and having little input into the adaptation process or being actively excluded (The Man Within, The Quiet American); and Greene adapting his own work Brighton Rock). The final thesis also entailed a substantial engagement with adaptation theory alongside frameworks deployed by production teams and writers to keep a project’s themes aligned during adaptation.
Shirley – soon to be officially Dr Shirley Day – is a writer, director, and lecturer in film, theatre and creative writing. She works at a number of American universities in London including Florida State University.
Once again we congratulate Shirley and hope that her thesis will emerge in due course as a book so that her fine scholarship will be accessible to the wide audience it deserves.
Shirley’s website is here: https://www.shirleyday.co.uk
