About
I work in theater and performance studies with a particular emphasis on the performing arts in Ireland and Britain from the 20th century onwards. Before joining the English Department, I was based at Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies, where I worked on Art for Reconciliation, an investigation into the impact of the funded arts on conflict transformation in Ireland. Previously, I worked as an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London, where I also completed my PhD. To date, my research has explored three areas: the gender politics of theatre, live art and dance in Ireland; the role of the applied arts in peacebuilding; and English literary perspectives on Irish politics and society.
My monograph, The Gender Politics of Contemporary Performance in Northern Ireland (Palgrave 2024), examines theatre and performance produced since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in the context of growing discontent with the failure of the peace to deliver genuinely transformative forms of social justice. The story it tells is of an emerging current within the performing arts consisting of work concerned not only with uncovering the morbid symptoms of the neoliberal peace, but also embodying those messy and everyday conditions of co-dependency, vulnerability and solidarity that both patriarchal ideologies and androcentric individualism seek to deny.
I am the Principal Investigator on Recovering the Art of Reconciliation, an AHRC-funded project with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to put together the first database of arts-based peacebuilding in the North.
My most recent research project is provisionally entitled Ireland and the English Literary Imagination, from post-war to Brexit. It traces how writers, including Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, David Rudkin, Howard Brenton, Hilary Mantel, and Jez Butterworth, wrote about Ireland and Irishness precisely in order to 'rewrite' the British state and English identity during the decline of the Empire. The project analyses these various efforts to challenge English literature's long history of anti-Irishness as part of a political struggle to imagine post-colonial conceptions of identity, citizenship, and culture.
I am open to supervising PhD theses in areas that intersect with any aspect of my research interests. I am particularly keen to supervise theses on modern and contemporary theatre/performance in Britain and Ireland.
My academic support and feedback hours are: Wednesdays 1 – 2 & Fridays 2 – 3. Please book in advance via email for in-person and online meetings.
Funded Fellowships
- Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow (Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 2025 - present)