In 1992 I completed a B.A. in English and three years of acting training at the Conservatoire National d'Art Dramatique of Orléans. While on an Erasmus exchange in Oxford, I wrote an M.A. thesis on Women's Roles in British Comedies 1880-1930. I spent a year in Oxford as a French assistant, engaging in theatre performances at the Maison Française d'Oxford. I then completed a M.Phil in Drama, 'Silencing & Licensing: the censorship of Shaw's The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet' (1995) at the University of Orléans, before embarking on a Ph.D devoted to theatre censorship: 'In the Wings of the Lord Chamberlain's Office: Theatre Censorship 1900-1968'. Since then, the primary focus of my research has been on twentieth-century British drama, and in particular the issue of censorship. As a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Theatre department of the University of Warwick, I interviewed a number of dramatists and theatre practitioners to write the final chapter of Theatre Censorship: From Walpole to Wilson (Oxford University Press, 2007). In doing so, I met Arnold Wesker in 2003, who invited me to consult the private archive he had compiled over his play The Journalists, rejected by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1972. This meeting opened up my second field of research, and I have since further interviewed him, translated his Shylock, and published on his work, more recently in Arnold Wesker: Fragments and Visions (Intellect, 2021), co-edited with Graham Saunders. I have recently completed three edited volumes on censorship - Adult Themes. British Cinema and the X Certificate in the Long 1960s (Bloomsbury, 2023), with Benjamin Halligan and Christopher Weedman; and Theatre Censorship in Contemporary Europe (University of Exeter Press, 2024) with Chris Megson; and the Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship (2024), with Graham Saunders. I am also editor of the new book series Palgrave S

My research focuses on 20th-century British drama. My interests include theatre censorship and dramatic literature from the 1950s onwards, in particular the theatre of Arnold Wesker. The issues call for an inter-disciplinary approach (literary and historical) and my work therefore involves a reflection on the political as well as cultural context. My first research field was devoted to the issue of theatre censorship. I have published extensively on the topic in England and abroad (see publications). When I finished my doctoral research, accounts of theatre censorship in England had so far focused on the activities of the Lord Chamberlain and his Readers, and the impact of censorship on the work of individual playwrights. In contrast, the history of censorship legislation has been neglected. My postdoctoral Fellowship enabled me to explore newly accessible archives and to interview political and artistic figures of the 1960s. Through its extensive investigation of political and personal archives, supplemented by a questionnaire survey and telephone and face-to-face interviews which I led, Theatre Censorship: from Walpole to Wilson (OUP, 2007) offers a completely new perspective on English cultural history. The volume traces the hidden alliances and compacts that helped to prevent the abolition of theatre censorship so that successive Governments during the twentieth century might be assured of a politically docile stage. In addition, are documented the regular private consultations between successive Lords Chamberlain and different Government ministers, which ensured that political censorship could be exercised without any public awareness of the fact. Despite objections from the Queen, and opposition from Harold Wilson (which had resulted in Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary, making resignation threats), theatre censorship was finally abolished in 1968 when a

MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY DRAMA AND THEATRE; BRITISH DRAMA; THEATRE CENSORSHIP I welcome Ph.D projects in these fields of study. Modules taught, inter alia: POSTGRADUATE TEACHING M.A. in American Literature and Film (O'Neill, Williams, Miller, Albee, Mamet) M.A. in Modernities (O'Neill, Beckett, Stoppard, Artaud, Gordon Craig) M.A. in Irish Writing (Beckett, Enda Walsh) EN6009 - Conference preparation Guest seminar intervention: ‘Theatre Censorship – a cat and mouse game?’ Invited seminar, PG7004 Master Class Module: Contemporary Theoretical Paradigms in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Knowledge and Control: Historical And Contemporary Perspectives. UCC, June 2013. UNDERGRADUATE TEACHING Lecture modules -EN1001 Foundations of Critical Practice - Drama (Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ionesco) * EN1003 Modern literature (Osborne, Beckett) * EN1004 Theories - Approaches to theatre (from Aristotle to Brecht) *EN2076 Theories of Drama * EN1012 Drama and Protest (Wesker) EN1101 Contexts (Chekhov and PanPan Theatre Company) EN2074 Studies in English Drama after 1660 (Congreve) EN2077 Inventing Modern Drama (from Ibsen to Wesker) * EN3079 Contemporary Culture (Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp) EN3091 Theory and Practice EN3098 Text into Film (from Shakespeare to Hollywood) Seminar modules *EN3006-EN3007 Pinter between 60s Social Realism and the Theatre of the Absurd. EN2006 George Bernard Shaw DR3010/DR2007: Acting out – Keys to Naturalist Acting (Department of Drama and Theatre Studies) EN2006-7 Harold Pinter - Sexual Politics and Political Discourse EN3008 Drama and Controversy EN2003 Revisiting the Swinging 60s EN3003 Research in Drama * denotes modules coordinated