Professor Fintan Walsh

Overview

Biography

Professor Walsh is Director of MA Text and Performance, and has served as Director of BA Theatre and Drama Studies. He is Co-Director of Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, Director of BiGS (Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality), and is School of Arts Research Ethics Chair and College Representative.

In the decade prior to joining Birkbeck in 2012, he worked at Queen Mary University of London (2011-12) and at Trinity College Dublin, where he was Irish Research Council Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (2009-2011), Coordinator of the MPhil Theatre and Performance (2010-2011), and associate lecturer (2004-2011). 

He has been a visiting lecturer/researcher at Freie Universität Berlin (2014/16), Humanities Institute, University College Dublin (2014), and Helsinki University (2015). 

His research investigates the histories, politics, forms, feelings and ideas that shape contemporary cultural practices, including via national and international collaborations with artists and academics. 

Highlights

• Forthcoming monograph:

  Performing the Queer Past: Public Possessions (Methuen Drama, 2023). 

  Why do contemporary queer theatre and performance appear to be possessed by the past? What aesthetic practices and dramaturgical devices reveal the occupation of the present by painful history? How might the experience of theatre and performance relieve the present of its most arduous burdens?  

  Following recent legislation and cultural initiatives across many western countries that suggest the darkest days for LGBTQ+ people are over, this book turns our attention to artists who invoke history’s enduring harm. Guiding us through an eclectic range of examples that includes Artangel, Cassils, David Hoyle, Dickie Beau, Franko B, Jeremy O. Harris, Karen Finley, les ballets C de la B, McDermott & McGough, Milo Rau, Rachel Mars, Split Britches and Travis Alabanza, Walsh explores how this work reckons with the incarceration and untimely death of Oscar Wilde, the Holocaust, racial objectification, the AIDS crisis and covid-19, alongside more local and personal experiences of violence, trauma and grief. 

  Walsh deftly traces how these histories are summoned and interrogated via what he elaborates as aesthetics and dramaturgies of possession, which lend form to the still-stinging aches and generative potential of injustice and loss. These strategies expose how the past continues to haunt a wishfully timeless present, while calling on those of us who feel its force to tend to history's unresolved hurt.
  

• Symposium:

  In November 2022, he organised the symposium Performing Pandemic Grief: The Arts of Losing, supported by a Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund award. Bringing together artists, academics, community organisers, health and social care professionals, the symposium explored the role of art, ritual, social and cultural practices in supporting grief in the wake of COVID-19.  

• New book series:

  Professor Walsh is founder and Editor of the new Cambridge University Press book series Elements in Contemporary Performance Texts, which responds to the evolution of the form, role and meaning of text in theatre and performance in the late 20th and 21st centuries, tracking its role through stages of development to public presentation and documentation. The series aims to track the different forms which text in performance takes, including dramatic writing; dramaturgical composition; oral and audio texts; textual embodiment, sounding and display.

  For more information, or to submit a proposal, email f.walsh@bbk.ac.uk.

• Recent publications:

  'Grief Machines: Transhumanist Theatre, Digital Performance, Pandemic Time,' Theatre Journal, 73: 3 (2021), pp. 391-407.

  Out now in paperback (March 2021): Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance (Methuen Drama, 2020).

Qualifications

• MPhil, PhD, Trinity College Dublin, 2007
• Fellow, HEA, 2012

Administrative responsibilities

• Director, MA Text and Performance
• Co-Director, Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre
• Director, BiGS (Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality)
• School of Arts Research Ethics Chair
• Steering Committee, Birkbeck Institute for Social Research (BISR)

Professional activities

Professor Walsh has examined PhD degrees at The University of Sydney; Royal Central School of Speech and Drama; Trinity College Dublin; University of East Anglia; University of Helsinki; Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, and MRes at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has served as External Examiner at University of Roehampton, University of Reading, and University College Dublin, and validated degrees nationally and internationally.

Walsh has worked as a script reader in the Literary Department of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and collaborated in script development, dramaturgy, and criticism projects with a number of theatre companies and organisations including Dublin Fringe Festival and Dublin Theatre Festival.  For over a decade he contributed reviews, feature articles and interviews for Irish Theatre Magazine, including as staff writer, and is a Member of Project Arts Centre, Dublin. 

Professor Walsh was Senior Editor of Theatre Research International between 2018 and 2021 (issues 44.1-46.3). Prior to this he was Associate Editor of the same journal, and served as an editorial board member between 2012-2015. He continues to serve on the editorial board of Theatre Research International and Imagined Theatres.

He frequently peer reviews articles and books for all the major publications and publishers in his field and cognate disciplines. He is a member of AHRC Peer Review College and has assessed grant applications internationally. 

Professional memberships

• Walsh is or has been a member of Irish Society for Theatre Research (ISTR), Performance Studies International (PSI), The Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA), and the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR), and currently serves on its Executive Committee. He has assessed funding applications nationally and internationally, and is as a member of AHRC Peer Review College.

• He is a founding member (2009) and former co-convenor (2009-2014) of IFTR's Queer Futures working group (2009), and co-edited the group's first collection of writings in Theatre Research International (2015). 

ORCID

0000-0002-4217-3335

Research

Research interests

• Contemporary and modern drama, theatre and performance
• Queer artistic practices and cultural politics
• Medical humanities and psychosocial issues
• Theatre, performance and digital culture
• Irish drama, theatre and performance

Research overview

Professor Walsh's research involves working with text, theatre, live performance, visual art, digital practices, artists and institutions to explore sometimes interrelated strands of inquiry: 1) contemporary drama, theatre and performance; 2) queer theatre, performance, visual art and cultural politics; 3) medical humanities and psychosocial issues; 4) theatre, performance and digital culture; 5) Irish drama, theatre and performance. A concern for the representational strategies and interventionist possibilities of bodies, subjects and histories shaped by trauma, loss, grief and marginalization unites this research, leading to monographs that examine masculinity and the enactment of self-injury and victimization (Male Trouble: Masculinity and the Performance of Crisis, 2010); the relationship among psychoanalysis, therapy culture and performance (Theatre & Therapy, 2013 ); and theatre and social and political change (Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation, 2016, shortlisted for the David Bradby Research Award). Professor Walsh's forthcoming book explores how troubled queer histories (re)appear in contemporary theatre, performance and installation practices via what he elaborates as aesthetics and dramaturgies of possession (Performing the Queer Past: Public Possessions, 2023). 

These concerns are also represented across numerous journal articles, book chapters and edited volumes. Recent publications on contagion and theatre, supported by ISSF/Wellcome funding, include 'Pathogenic Performativity: Theatrical Contagion and Fascist Affect' (in The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science, ed. Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr, 2021) and the collection Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance (2020). 

Professor Walsh's current project focuses on the aesthetics and politics of grief, some of which has been published as ‘Grief Machines: Transhumanist Theatre, Digital Performance, Pandemic Time’ (Theatre Journal, 2021).

Research Centres and Institutes

• Director, Birkbeck Institute for Gender and Sexuality Studies
• Co-Director, Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre
• Member, Centre for Medical Humanities

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions within Birkbeck:

6

Professor Walsh welcomes inquiries from prospective PhD students (including practice-led projects) interested in researching within his field or related areas, in particular topics relating to:

• Contemporary and modern drama, theatre and performance;
  
• Queer theatre, performance, art and cultural practices;
• Medical and health humanities and psychosocial issues;
• Theatre, performance and digital culture;
  
• Irish drama, theatre and performance;
  

Recently or currently supervised PhD projects investigate ecology and performance, Sarah Kane and psychoanalysis, mental illness and contemporary theatre, neurodiversity and performance, masculinity and Theatre of the Oppressed. 

He established GRiT (Graduate Research in Theatre) in 2014, to foster and support graduate research in drama, theatre and performance studies. Forthcoming and past events can be found here.

Current doctoral researchers

• CLAU DI GIANFRANCESCO

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2021 onwards

• ALEX LEGGETT

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Oct 2018 onwards

  Title of thesis:

  Quirky Dramaturgy and Autism in Contemporary UK Performance

• MARIA PATSOU

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor

  Title of thesis:

  Representations of mental illness in UK contemporary performance

Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

• LEAH SIDI

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor

  Title of thesis:

  Sarah Kane’s Dramaturgy of Psychic Life

  Awarded:

  2019

• BRUNO ROUBICEK

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor

  Title of thesis:

  Performing Social Labour: Digging, Dwelling and the City

  Awarded:

  2017

Teaching

Professor Walsh teaches across MA Text and Performance, BA Theatre and Drama/Theatre and English, and MA Dramaturgy. 

Teaching modules

• Dissertation: Theatre and Performance Research (AREN031D7)
• Space and Performance (Critical Practice II) (AREN097S5)
• Performing Texts (AREN276S7)
• Collaborative Theatre Making (AREN277S7)

Publications

Business and community

Outreach

In his capacity as Co-Director of Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre and Director of BiGS, Professor Walsh routinely works directly with artists, activists and academics to engage a range of publics. This takes the form of leading Artist Fellowship and Artist in Association schemes, as well as developing symposia, conferences and workshops.

Professor Walsh has directly organised or co-organised a number of symposia and international conferences at Birkbeck that engage academic, artistic and the public including the Irish Society for Theatre Research's annual conference 'The Irish and the City' in 2013, 'On Going On: Sustaining Life in Theatre' in 2015, Politicians & Other Performers and Theatres of Contagion: Infectious Performance in 2017.

He frequently speaks at international theatre and performance events and symposia, and has presented keynotes, lectures or workshops by invitation at the following:  Humboldt University, Berlin; Royal Holloway, University of London; International Federation for Theatre Research; London Theatre Seminar; University of Warwick; the Freud Museum; University of Cambridge; The Courtauld Institute of Art; University of Surrey; University of Reading; Freie Universität Berlin; University of Helsinki, Queen Mary University of London; Queen's University Belfast; University College Dublin; Brunel University London; Dublin Theatre Festival; Project Arts Centre; LÓKAL International Theatre Festival, Reykjavik; Arcola Theatre and Synge Summer School, Wicklow.