I am a scholar of 20th century drama, especially of how British theater responded to the radically new political economy of the eighties. My current book project, City on Fire, is about one year on the London stage: about political fissures, sweeping privatization, fracturing liberalism, rising costs, nostalgia for empire, collapsing visions of public life—and about a resulting crisis of theatrical genre—in 1988. But it is also about the ways catastrophe (a word deriving from ancient Greek theater) reshapes the English imagination from civil war to the present, how drowned or bombed or burning cities are simultaneously figures of cataclysm and of utopia. It considers Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, David Hare, Rodney Ackland, and Jez Butterworth, but also, occasionally, Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, Raymond Williams, Francis Fukuyama, and The Clash.
My teaching and reading interests are a little more varied, extending to texts in postcolonialism, globalization, neoliberalism, critical and political theory, and the Restoration and early Enlightenment. I have designed courses on tragedy and action, crime fiction, climate catastrophe, Antigones, and shitposting. At the moment I am making my way through Jonathan Bach’s What Remains, an ethnography of East Germany after the fall of the wall, and dreaming up a class on the politics of memory in European theater; next on the list is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s expansive volume Empire. Check in next year to see whether I’ve finished it.
PhD
English, UC Irvine, 2025
Publications
“Tracing a Theory of Human Dignity in Shakespeare’s King Lear.” Renascence, vol. 74, no. 3-4, Su/Fa 2023.
“Review of Scenes from Bourgeois Life, by Nicolas Ridout.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, vol. 37, no. 1, fall 2022, 101-103.