About
My research and teaching encompass contemporary theatre and performance in Britain, Ireland, and beyond. To date, my work has focussed on the politics of theatre, live art and dance in Ireland, with an emphasis on gender, conflict transformation and cultural policy. I was previously 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. While at the Institute I taught courses on politics and literature and, before that, I worked as an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London, where I also acquired my PhD.
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 Hibernology After Empire: Ireland and the English Literary Imagination. 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.