Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance

I am a Professor of English—and of Theatre and Drama—and have taught at Indiana since 1985. My major research interests include drama and theatre of the 19th and 20th centuries, Irish Studies, and the contemporary university. I’ve recently finished three books:  Bernard Shaw’s Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect: Shaw, Freud, Simmel (2018), which reads Shaw’s writing, particularly his early novels, in the context of an emergent psychoanalysis at the fin de siècle of the nineteenth century, so-called “marginal” economics, and contemporary affect theory; “Something Dreadful and Grand”: American Literature and the Irish-Jewish Unconscious (2015), which examines the often uncanny cultural interactions between Irish-American and Jewish-American immigrants from around 1850-1950 and the notions of performance, multi—directional memory, and an Irish-Jewish modern literature; and Beckett and Contemporary Irish Writing (2009), which discusses such writers as Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, Marina Carr, John Banville, Paul Muldoon, and Derek Mahon. My next book project concerns constructions of audience in contemporary Irish, British, and American playwriting.