Profile
I am an academic, educator and arts practitioner whose work on contemporary creative practice and culture brings together performance history and theory, political economy and cultural studies. I studied theatre, performance, literature and culture at Queen Mary, University of London and the University of Nottingham. My PhD research at Queen Mary, University of London was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. At Birkbeck, University of London, I directed the BA Theatre Studies programmes, establishing joint honours provision with creative writing, film and media and arts management, and taught on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes across the School of Arts. Alongside my teaching I served as co-organiser of the annual festival Arts Week, co-director of the Centre for Contemporary Theatre, and director of the Peltz Gallery. I have also taught at Queen Mary, University of London, Goldsmiths College, University of London, and Laban.
My research investigates the reciprocity between theatre and performance, economic change, and modes of governance. My book Restaging the Future: Neoliberalization, Theater, and Performance in Britain (Northwestern University Press, 2024) addresses the impact of the marketization of social life on theatre and performance of the mid-2000s, via analyses of contemporary dance and live art, site-specific performance, community film, music, and documentary theatre. My current book project, Theatre & Money (Bloomsbury Methuen) examines how, in the 2010s and 2020s, theatre and performance artists interrogated the status and function of money, focusing particularly on uses of participatory performance, adaptations of canonical works, and engagements with currency in visual art. My essays in other contexts scrutinise various artistic responses to neoliberalization, examining themes of collectivity, identity, individualization, insecurity, law, migration, and regeneration.
I have collaborated with numerous artists and academic colleagues to realise projects and events that advance the intersections between performance practice and research in multiple domains – from international conferences, seminars and symposia, arts festivals, digital art, and exhibition curation, to designing doctoral training events and opportunities for student support. Collaborative initiatives with theatre artists include Human Jam (2019)/The St James’ Gardens Project (2018), a performance created by Camden People’s Theatre; Twofold: the Particularities of Working in Pairs (2017), a symposium, workshop and performance event produced with Karen Christopher/Haranczak/Navarre Performance Projects; Being European (2016), two short festivals and talks series with Camden People’s Theatre, University of Winchester and University of Kent; Gendering Austerity (2015 & 2016), two multidisciplinary symposia curated with colleagues in Geography and Management featuring Alinah Azadeh, Paper Birds, Leo Butler and Clean Break; and Beyond Glorious: the Radical in Socially Engaged Practices (2013), a symposium co-organised with Rajni Shah, Elizabeth Lynch and Mary Paterson. Other collaborations include ‘World Factory: the politics of conversation’ (2015) – a discussion between arts, social science and politics scholars of METIS Arts’ game-theatre performance I curated for Contemporary Theatre Review: Interventions; and Conventions of Proximity in Art, Theatre and Performance (2016), a multidisciplinary symposium culminating in ‘On Proximity’ (2017), an edition of Performance Research co-edited with Ben Cranfield (RCA).
My service to the field spans contexts and disciplines. As a member of ATHE’s Performance Studies Focus Group, I curated the Emerging Scholars Panel in Denver (2008), and co-curated pre-conferences in Los Angeles (2010), Chicago (2011) and Washington DC (2012). With Michael McKinnie (QMUL), I co-convened an ASTR 2016 Working Group on Theatre and Real Estate. I regularly act as peer reviewer for the key academic publishers in our field, and I am a member of the International Scientific Advisory Board for the open access journal Law/Art. I co-convene London Theatre Seminar.
Areas of Expertise
- Modern and contemporary theatre and performance
- Histories and practices of socially engaged and participatory art, theatre and performance
- Political economy and performance
- Culture and social reproduction
- Public policy
- Audiences
- Cultural geography
PhD Supervision
I have supervised PhD projects on performances of emotional labour in the service industry, and the cultural politics of the work of nineteenth century playwright Henry Arthur Jones, and have examined four PhDs on topics of postfeminism, unemployment, precarity and surveillance in contemporary performance. My current supervisees are working on practice-based projects – a sited playwriting project exploring representations of rural queer and lesbian identities, and an investigation of discourses of cultural production in and around Union Street, Plymouth. I welcome applications from PhD students in relation to any of my areas of expertise.
Key Publications
2024. Restaging the Future: Neoliberalization, Theater, and Performance in Britain (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press)
2023. ‘Government, Policy and Censorship in Post-war British Theatre’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945, ed. by Dan Rebellato and Jen Harvie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 209-228.
2022. ‘Re-membering assembly’ (with Marilena Zaroulia), in Crisis, Representation and Resilience: Perspectives on Contemporary British Theatre, ed. by Clare Wallace, Clara Escoda, Enric Monforte and José Ramón Prado-Pérez (London: Bloomsbury Methuen), pp. 209-225.
2022. ‘Introductory essay to Beyond Caring’, in Alexander Zeldin, The Inequalities: Beyond Caring; LOVE; Faith, Hope and Charity (London: Bloomsbury Methuen), pp. 1-16.
2019. ‘How does theatre represent economic systems?’, Thinking through Theatre and Performance, ed. by Maaike Bleeker, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher and Heike Roms (London: Bloomsbury Methuen), pp. 70-84.
2017. ‘On Proximity’, Performance Research, 22.3.
2017. ‘Editorial’ (with Ben Cranfield), ‘On Proximity’, Performance Research, 22.3, April/May, 1-6.
2017. ‘Defending collective sociality: The Oresteia at Shakespeare’s Globe’, in Reading the Crisis: Legal, Philosophical and Literary Perspectives, ed. by Massimo Meccarelli (Madrid: Editorial Dykinson), pp. 117-131 (open access)
2016. ‘Back to the future: gendering the economy in twenty-first century drama’, Twenty-First Century British Drama: What Happens Now, ed. by Siân Adiseshiah and Louise LePage (London: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 107-128.
2015. Curator, ‘World Factory: the politics of conversation’, Contemporary Theatre Review: Interventions (October)
2015. ‘Theatrical nationhood: crisis on the National stage’, Performances of Capitalism, Crises and Resistance: Inside/Outside Europe, ed. by Marilena Zaroulia and Philip Hager (London: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 113-133.
2015. ‘“Knowledge”, Acts of Voting: a Lexicon’, Contemporary Theatre Review: Interventions (May)
2014. Review: Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations, edited by Lara D. Nielsen and Patricia Ybarra’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 24.2, 272-273.
2014. ‘Beyond Glorious: the radical in engaged practices’ (with Sophie Hope, Sarah Amsler, Andrea Luka Zimmerman, David Roberts, Theron Schmidt, and John Pinder), Contemporary Theatre Review, 24.2, 284-288.
2013. ‘Robert Wilson’s Walking’, Contemporary Theatre Review: The Cultural Politics of the Olympics: Performing Global Britishness, 23.4, 568-573.
2013. ‘“The witness and the replay”: London Bubble’, Performance and Community: Commentary and Case Studies, ed. by Caoimhe McAvinchey (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama), pp. 155-187.
2012. ‘Audio Obscura, or, “Dread in the Fallen City”’, frakcija: to be moved, 58-59, 118-123.
2012. ‘“Work that body”: precarity and femininity in the new economy’, TDR: the Drama Review: On Precarity, 56.4, 78-94.
2012. ‘“Places, like property prices, go up and down”: site-specificity, regeneration and The Margate Exodus’, Performing Site Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice, ed. by Joanne Tompkins and Anna Birch (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 150-164.
2011. ‘‘Identity correction’: the Yes Men and acts of ‘discursive leverage’’, Performance Research, 16.2, 28-36.
2008. ‘“In tune with the beat of where they are”: the AfroReggae UK Partnership in 2007’, PPP Research Bulletin, 4, 1-14.
2007. ‘Review: The Community Performance Reader, eds. Petra Kuppers and Gwen Robertson & Petra Kuppers, Community Performance: an Introduction’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 17.4, 582-583.
2007. ‘Review: A Boal Companion: Dialogues in Theatre and Cultural Politics, eds. Jan Cohen-Cruz and Mady Schutzman’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 17.1, 111-113.
Register of Interest
Nothing to declare.