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 Studies in Cultural Censorship, the first volume of which will be published in 2025.

My next research project on Wesker's work began in June 2024 with a visit to his archives at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas in Austin, which has awarded me a Fellowship. I am currently working through the data to elaborate new publication projects. 

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 new statute was enacted giving the stage the same freedom under the law as any other form of artistic expression. 

Since then, I have expanded my research in censorship to observe its shifting forms beyond Britain, and beyond theatre - such as in Adult Themes. British Cinema and the X Certificate in the Long 1960s (Bloomsbury, 2023), which I co-edited with Benjamin Halligan and Christopher Weedman, a volume which tapped into my dual interest in censorship and the Sixties.
The contemporary era, dominated by culture wars, shows that if censorship is not a new concept it remains a subject for radical investigation as it continues to expand its oppressive and restrictive presence globally. My latest edited collections respond to global and  contemporary questionings about the definitions, forms, sources, scopes, and consequences of censorship. In Theatre Censorship in Contemporary Europe. Silence and Protest (UEP, 2024), co-edited with Chris Megson, the objective was to take the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and its associated radical ideologies as a starting point to re-assess how the unifying movement of Europe and particular national politics have affected artistic creation and free expression. In the Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship (2024), co-edited with Graham Saunders, the impetus was to gather international scholars to query how theatre censorship has evolved across centuries and continents, serving as disciplinarian in democracies and dictatorships alike, re-inventing itself even when officially abolished to the point that its presence and terminology itself is questioned. To pursue this crucial investigation into the limits of artistic freedom and expand it to a wider cultural field, Graham Saunders and I are co-editing a new series, the Palgrave Studies in Cultural Censorship.   

In my postdoctoral interviews with surviving politicians and playwrights in 2002-2003, there were compelling moments of insight and explanation, and my published work on censorship is making use of this interdisciplinary methodology which very much defines my work. My research on censorship led me to meet Arnold Wesker, which initiated my second field of research. 

Having initially discussed censorship with him, I became curious about the eclectic nature of his dramaturgy as well as the striking arc of his career, from lauded champion of kitchen sink drama to sidelined or forgotten figure of the 60s. Thus began my journey into trying to understand what happened to Wesker and his plays. After writing a first article for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, British and Irish Playwrights Since World War II, in 2004 I was awarded a Fellowship by the Harry Ransom Center, University of Austin, Texas, to research the Wesker archives. The visit into the first two accessions, and a further interview with Wesker in 2013 sustained my publications - redefining his impact on stage and in cultural terms in "Visions Don't Work" (published in Studies in Theatre and performance), questioning and translating his Shylock, considering his lesser-known plays - up to the edited volume Arnold Wesker: Fragments and Visions (Intellect, 2021).

Since coming to Cork, however, my research interest was drawn to the work of contemporary local theatre activities and in particular by the cultural impact of Corcadorca, a theatre company which emerged in the early 1990s through the collaboration of director Pat Kiernan and dramatist Enda Walsh. Beyond their international acclaim with Disco Pigs, I was drawn by the eclectic artistic duality of the company and its focus on its local audiences. I explored their various employment of site-responsive and site-specific work not only in publications (such as the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English) but also through a funded-DUETS project which revisited the sites of their production of The Merchant of Venice in 2005 and the memories it created in its audience members through oral testimonies. My latest book chapter, in Theatre Censorship in Contemporary Europe. Silence and Protest, reflects on the company closure as a result of a dripfeeding phenomenon of subsidies. 

In 2024 I was awarded a Harry Ransom Center Fellowship to research the now completed - but  not yet fully catalogued - collection of Arnold Wesker, my research projects are geared towards more elaborating book projects on his work.

 
 

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