About
- Contemporary theatre (political theatre in particular)
- Utopian literature, drama and theory (classical Greece – the present)
- Twenty-first century literature, drama and cultural contexts
- Ageing and gerontology studies; women’s writing; and class studies
I joined Loughborough University as Senior Lecturer in English and Drama in June 2018 as part of the Excellence 100 campaign. I previously worked at the University of Lincoln (from 2004-2018), where I founded Lincoln’s 21st Century Research Group, co-established the ‘What Happens Now’ conference series (now the official conference series for BACLS) and the MA in 21st Century Literature. I’ve also taught at the Open University and the University of Birmingham. My PhD (on the plays of Caryl Churchill) was funded by the AHRC, undertaken at the University of Birmingham and awarded in 2003. My research interests lie mostly in contemporary theatre and twenty-first century literary studies, utopianism, class studies, women’s writing and (more recently) age studies.
My first book – Churchill’s Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill (2009) – was based on my PhD. It examined Churchill’s plays in relation to histories of left-wing politics, theory and activism from 1970s-2000. My second and third were co-edited volumes: Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now (2013) and Twenty-First Century Drama: What Happens Now (2016). My fourth is a co-edited collection of essays on the contemporary playwright debbie tucker green (debbie tucker green: Critical Perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019 forthcoming).
My current book project is a monograph for Methuen Bloomsbury with the title Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre, which goes back to classical Greek comedy and includes chapters on early modern and early twentieth-century drama as well as the contemporary period.
Despite the historical span of my current monograph, I am primarily a scholar of contemporary drama/literary studies and within this I’m particularly interested in political theatre, literature and politics, class studies, utopian theory and aesthetics, and feminist theatre, and have published many journal articles and book chapters in these areas.
More recently I have started to write about ageing, especially old age, and theatre. My most recent article in this area is ‘The Utopian Potential of Aging and Longevity in Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah’, Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal (May 2019, forthcoming). In my current work on ageing, I am exploring encounters between dominant framings of the contemporary and ageing/old age (particularly female old age) in 21st-century drama and fiction. In collaboration with Age UK Lincoln I established the ‘Older Readers’ 21st-century Literature Reading Group’ (comprising a group of Lincolnshire residents over the age of 60), which meets regularly with academics and is now in its fifth year. In November 2016, I organised an event called ‘The Good Age: Long Life, Literature and Utopianism’ as part of Being Human: A Festival of Humanities, which had ‘Hope and Fear’ as its theme.
I am an executive committee member of BACLS and am on the editorial boards of Bloomsbury New Horizons in Contemporary Literature, C21 Literature and the Journal of Gender Studies.
I have supervised four PhD projects to completion. These were in the areas of utopianism, contemporary fiction, women’s writing, and Marxist literary criticism, and am currently supervising a fifth on social class in the novels of Patricia Highsmith.
Education
2003 PhD in English Literature, University of Birmingham
Thesis: ‘Theory, Politics, and Cultural Practice in the Plays of Caryl Churchill’ (awarded with no corrections)
Funding: AHRC (fully funded)
Supervisor: Professor Tony Davies Internal Examiner: Dr Robert Wilcher External Examiner: Professor Lizbeth Goodman
1998 MPhil in English Literature, University of Birmingham
Thesis: ‘Victorian Constructions of Race in Shakespeare’
Funding: AHRC (fully funded)
Supervisor: Professor Peter Holland
External Examiner: Professor John Drakakis
1997 BA (Hons) English (1st Class), University of Birmingham
1994 Ruskin College Diploma in Literature (Commendation), Ruskin College, Oxford
Publications
Books
· Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre, London: Methuen Drama, 2021 [contracted; forthcoming]
· Co-edited (with Jacqueline Bolton), debbie tucker green: Critical Perspectives, London: Palgrave, 2019 [contracted; forthcoming]
· Co-edited (with Louise LePage), Twenty-First Century Drama: What Happens Now, London: Palgrave, 2016
· Co-edited (with Rupert Hildyard), Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013
· Churchill’s Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill, Newcastle: CSP, 2009
Chapters in books
- ‘debbie tucker green and (the Dialectics of) Dispossession: Reframing the Ethical Encounter’ (co-authored with Jaqueline Bolton), in Siân Adiseshiah and Jacqueline Bolton (eds), debbie tucker green: Critical Perspectives, London: Palgrave 2019 [forthcoming]
- ‘“change ain’t fuckin polite, scuse my language”: situating debbie tucker green’ (co-authored with Jaqueline Bolton), in Siân Adiseshiah and Jacqueline Bolton (eds), debbie tucker green: Critical Perspectives, London: Palgrave 2019 [forthcoming]
- ‘‘Chavs’, ‘Gyppos’ and ‘Scum’? Class in 21st-century Drama’, in Twenty-First Century Drama: What Happens Now, eds. Siân Adiseshiah and Louise LePage, London: Palgrave, 2016, 149-171
- ‘The Times of Caryl Churchill’, in The Theatre of Caryl Churchill by R. Darren Gobert, London: Methuen, 2014, 214-224
- ‘What Happens Now’, in Twenty-first Century Fiction: What Happens Now, eds. Siân Adiseshiah and Rupert Hildyard, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013, 1-14.
- ‘The Dramatization of Futureless Worlds: Caryl Churchill’s Ecological Dystopias’, in Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, On Screen, On Stage, ed. Fátima Vieira, Newcastle: CSP, 2013
- ‘Still a Socialist?: Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker and Far Away’, in Drama and/after Postmodernism, German Society for Contemporary Drama in English, eds. Martin Middeke and Christoph Henke, Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2007, 121-38
- ‘Utopian Gesture in the Cold Climate of Thatcherism: Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls and Fen’, in Utopia Matters: Theory, Politics, Literature and the Arts, ed. by Fátima Vieira and Marinela Freitas, Porto: University of Oporto, 2005, 183-95
Peer-reviewed journal articles
- ‘Spectatorship and the New (Critical) Sincerity: The Case of Forced Entertainment’s Tomorrow’s Parties’, Contemporary Drama in English 4.1 (May 2016): 180-195
- ‘The Revolution will not be Dramatized: The Problem of Mediation in Caryl Churchill’s Revolution Plays’, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, Special issue on Caryl Churchill 19.1 (2013): 377-393
- ‘Political Returns on the 21st Century Stage: Caryl Churchill’s Far Away, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? and Seven Jewish Children’, C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings 1.1 (2012): 99-117
- ‘“I just die for some authority!” Barriers to Utopia in Howard Brenton’s Greenland’, Comparative Drama 46.1 (Spring 2012): 41-55
- ‘“We Said We Wouldn’t Look Back”: Utopia and the Backward Glance in Dorothy Reynolds and Julian Slade’s Salad Days’, Studies in Musical Theatre 5.2 (2011): 149-161
- ‘Revolution and the End of History: Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest’, Modern Drama 52.3 (Fall 2009): 279-95
- ‘Utopian Space in Caryl Churchill’s History Plays: Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Vinegar Tom’, Utopian Studies 16.1 (Spring 2005), 3-26
Projects
I am currently principal convenor of the British Academy conference – ‘Narratives of Old Age and Gender’ – which is scheduled to take place at Carlton House Terrace, London, 12-13 September 2019, and will be run with co-convenors Dr Amy Culley (University of Lincoln) and Dr Jonathon Shears (Keele University). Taking a broad historical perspective from the early modern period to the present, this conference puts past and present into dialogue on this urgent topic. By addressing representations of both ageing masculinity and femininity, the conference asks how gendered cultural narratives can be crucial for gerontological debates and how studies of gender are enriched by attending to old age. The conference brings together scholars from multiple disciplines, creative practitioners, and experts on ageing from third sector organizations to consider narratives of old age and gender, their limitations and the potential for alternatives. More details can be found online.
I have joined the most recent phase of an international research project called ‘British Theatre in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis, Affect, Community’ (2017-2020) which is funded by the Spanish government and coordinated by colleagues at the University of Barcelona. As part of this I am writing a book chapter on ageing and/as crisis in twenty-first century British theatre. Memberships
British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS)
Theatre and Performance Association (TaPRA)
Utopian Studies Society
