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I am Dean of Research and Knowledge Exchange and Professor of Creative and Cultural History at Central St Martins. Previously I was Director of Research and Innovation for Arts and Humanities at the University of Kent. I have taught and researched in the School of Arts, University of Kent, as well as at the Universities of Nottingham and Exeter and in 2023 I was interim Director of the Graduate School at Northeastern University London. I am an Advance HE Senior Fellow, a member of the AHRC Peer Review College and a peer reviewer for both national and international funding bodies.
As a researcher and practitioner, I am passionate about storytelling and creative engagement with diverse and marginalised heritage and histories. My work moves between performance, digital art and cultural histories, and I work closely with industry partners and community contexts, often co-designing and co-delivering projects. Collaborative projects include the Great War Theatre project (AHRC) and Beyond the Binary: Performing Gender Then and Now (AHRC), where I worked with a gender-diverse team of public researchers, students, performers, and archivists using lived experience to explore and share histories of gender in pantomime and music hall. Through these and other projects I have produced performances, artworks, open access databases and exhibitions and worked with partners including the National Theatre Archives and Ambassadors Theatre Group. I have also appeared on podcasts, radio and television. My academic publications cover theatre history from the eighteenth-century to mid twentieth-century, and reflect my particular interests in gender and sexuality, popular culture, the politics of performance, and theatre as a site of social engagement. Publications include The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre of the First World War, and Actresses, Gender and the Eighteenth Century Stage: Playing Women. I am also co-editor of the Exeter University Press series Performance Studies.
I am co-founder and director of the Gateways Partnership, which developed from Gateways to the First World War (AHRC) on which I was a co-investigator. The Gateways Partnership works with cultural, creative and community partners to bring arts and history together. Recent work includes Walking with Ghosts in partnership with Imperial War Museums as part of their 14-18 NOW Legacy of War fund. Walking with Ghosts was an immersive site-specific experience which reached 30,000 people and was featured on national media. Building on this, in 2024 I am working in partnership with Passchendaele Memorial Museum, Belgium, on a multilingual experience bringing together live performance with spatial augmented reality. De Weg Terug (The Way Back) explores the forgotten history of returning refugees to Belgium and will be staged as part of the West Flanders cultural programme in May 2025.
I enjoy teaching and supervise postgraduate research students whose research areas link to my own.
Telephone
+44 (0)20 7514 7444
