Professor Fintan Walsh

Overview

Biography

Fintan Walsh is Head of the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication and Professor of Performing Arts and Humanities. 

He is founding Director of Birkbeck Creative Practice Lab and Co-Director of Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre.

He recently led in the creation of the College's first Arts and Culture Strategy, 2024-30, which captures our commitments and ambitions in supporting, growing and promoting arts and culture in the university, and their social, civic, and economic benefits.

Since joining Birkbeck in 2012, he has served as Programme Director of MA Text and Performance (2016-23), for which he established an industry partnership with Camden People's Theatre) and BA Theatre and Drama Studies and affiliate programmes (2014-16). Fintan has been Director of BiGS (Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality) (2018-23), Chair of the School of Arts Research Ethics Committee (2019-23), and served on the steering committee of Birkbeck Institute for Social Research (2018-23). He has been a Director of Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre since 2014.

Prior to joining Birkbeck, Fintan worked at Queen Mary University of London (2011-2012) and Trinity College Dublin, where he was Irish Research Council Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (2009-2011).

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 focuses on contemporary theatre and performance, including writing for performance, live art, visual and digital practices. It investigates the histories, politics, forms, feelings and ideas that shape contemporary performing arts and cultural practices, including via national and international collaborations with artists and academics. His work has been funded by OSUN (Open Society Research Network), Wellcome Trust ISSF, CHASE (AHRC) and Irish Research Council. 

In 2023, he was awarded Birkbeck's Vice Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. 

Highlights

• Forthcoming anthology

  Writing Queer Performance: Contemporary Texts and Documents (Methuen Drama, forthcoming 2025) profiles the work of some of the UK's most exciting contemporary queer performances, through a combination of retrospective scripts, development material and visual documentation to ensure their enduring accessibility. Developed by working closely with performers and performance makers, the works include: 

  Black (2013), Le Gateau Chocolat
  Pull the Trigger (2016), Vijay Patel
  Re-Member Me (2017), Dickie Beau
  DollyWould (2017), Sh!t Theatre
  NIGHTCLUBBING (2018), Ray Young
  Pleasure Seekers (2022), Bourgeois & Maurice
  The Making of Pinocchio (2022),Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill
  Ten Commandments (2022), David Hoyle

• Forthcoming

  Commentary and notes to Phillip McMahon's Once Before I Go [2021] (London: Methuen Drama [Student Editions], 2025), pp. 1-25.

• New expanded edition

  An expanded version of Theatre & Therapy (first published in 2013) to be published by Methuen in October 2024.  

• New book

  Performing Grief in Pandemic Theatres is published by Cambridge University Press in 2024 as part of the series Elements in Contemporary Performance Texts. This book builds on the Wellcome Trust ISSF supported symposium, Performing Pandemic Grief: The Arts of Losing, which explored the role of theatre, performance, art and cultural practices in supporting grief in the wake of COVID-19. Some of his work on digital performance, theatre and grief has already been published as 'Grief Machines: Transhumanist Theatre, Digital Performance, Pandemic Time,' Theatre Journal, 73: 3 (2021), pp. 391-407.

  
  Click here for an introduction to the book by the author.

• Recent book

  Performing the Queer Past: Public Possessions (Methuen Drama, September 2023; pb March 2025.)

  Following recent legislation and cultural initiatives across many Western countries hailed as confirming the darkest days for LGBTQ+ people were over, this book turns our attention to artists fixed on history’s enduring harm. Guiding us through an eclectic range of examples including theatre, performance, installation and digital practices, this book explores how the queer past is summoned and interrogated via what Walsh elaborates as the aesthetics and dramaturgies of possession, which lend form to the still-stinging aches and generative potential of injury, injustice and loss. These strategies expose how the past continues to haunt and disturb the present, the book argues, while calling on those of us who feel its force to respond to history’s unresolved hurt.
  
   

• (Post) Pandemic Digital Theatres

  Professor Walsh was PI for the OSUN-funded Experimental Humanities project 'Digital Experimentations and Technological Transformations: Interviews with (Post) Pandemic Theatre and Performance Artists' (2023), which explores how theatre and performance artists are using digital technologies in the years following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The project involves academics and artists working in the UK, Austria, Columbia, Germany, South Africa and the USA. 

  
  

• Book series

  Walsh is founder and Senior 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.

Office hours

By arrangement.

Qualifications

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

Administrative responsibilities

• Head, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
• Director, Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre

Professional activities

Professor Walsh has examined PhD degrees at the University of Leeds; University of Brighton; 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, most recently as external evaluator for Malta Further and Higher Education Authority.

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 has served on its Executive Committee (2018-2021). He is an invited Member of Project Arts Centre, Dublin.

• Walsh served as Senior Editor (2018-2021), Associate Editor (2015-2018) and editorial board member (2012-2015; 2021-2024) of Theatre Research International, the society journal of the International Federation for Theatre Research published by Cambridge University Press. He serves on the board of the journal Imagined Theatres and is founding Editor of book series Elements in Contemporary Performance Texts published by Cambridge University Press.

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

• He is a member of AHRC's Peer Review College since 2017 and has assessed funding applications nationally and internationally, including for the Einstein Foundation Berlin, the National Science Centre Poland and numerous universities. 

  
  

  
  

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
• Writing for performance
• Irish drama, theatre and performance

Research overview

Professor Walsh's research focuses on contemporary theatre and performance in interdisciplinary contexts, including writing for performance, live art, installation, visual and digital practices, artists and institutions to explore sometimes interrelated strands of inquiry: medical humanities and psychosocial issues; queer theatre, performance, visual art and cultural politics;  digital theatre and performance culture, and writing for performance.  A concern for the representational strategies and interventionist possibilities of bodies, subjects and histories shaped by cultural marginalisation, injury and loss unites this research.

Supported by Wellcome ISSF funding, his most recent monograph Performing Grief in Pandemic Theatres (2024) explores how digital practices, theatre and performance supported audiences and communities in grief during the Covid-19 pandemic. Performing the Queer Past: Public Possessions (2023) examines how troubled queer histories (re)appear in contemporary theatre, performance, installation and digital practices via the aesthetics and dramaturgies of possession. This work builds on previous monographs that explore theatre, performance and socio-political change (Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation, 2016, shortlisted for the David Bradby Research Award); the relationship between masculinity and the enactment of self-injury and victimization (Male Trouble: Masculinity and the Performance of Crisis, 2010); and theatre's imbrication in psychoanalysis and therapy cultures (Theatre & Therapy, 2013; revised and expanded in 2024).

These concerns are also represented across numerous journal articles, book chapters and edited volumes. Writing Queer Performance: Contemporary Texts and Documents (2025) explores and documents the writing practices underpinning contemporary queer performance. Recent publications on contagion and theatre, supported by Wellcome ISSF funding, include 'Pathogenic Performativity: Theatrical Contagion and Fascist Affect' (in The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science, 2021) and his edited book Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance (2020). 

Walsh led the OSUN-funded Experimental Humanities project.

Research Centres and Institutes

• Affiliate Group, Birkbeck Institute for Gender and Sexuality Studies
• Director, Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre
• Member, Centre for Medical and Health Humanities

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions within Birkbeck:

8

Professor Walsh supervises PhD projects (including practice-led research) within his own subject area and alongside colleagues in other fields. His PhD students have been funded by CHASE/AHRC, ESRC and Birkbeck. Subjects supervised include chemsex and autofiction; Sarah Kane and mental health; mental illness and contemporary theatre; neurodiversity, autism and performance; masculinity and Theatre of the Oppressed. Professor Walsh welcomes inquiries from prospective PhD students 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
• Digital performance culture
  
• Irish drama, theatre and performance
  

He established GRiT (Graduate Research in Theatre) in 2014, to foster and support graduate research in drama, theatre and performance studies and has led a number of CHASE-funded training events to support graduate research students (Digital Conferencing in (Post) Pandemic Times, 2021; Researching (with) Difficult Feelings, 2017). 

Current doctoral researchers

• JACK MCINTOSH

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Oct 2022 onwards

  Title of thesis:

  Theatre and Autism: Staging the Interior

• MATTHEW BATES

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2023 onwards

  Title of thesis:

  Writing Chemsex: Unlocking the syndetic of a gay male subculture

  Description:

  Although considerable advances have been made within academia to situate and understand the chemsex subculture, clinical studies focus mainly on behaviours, risk, and health prevention with minimal investigation into the empirically orientated or written testimonies that could potentially unlock some of the questions posed by such studies. Similarly, the current cultural and sociological responses are, for the majority, concerned with situating the cause of the rising chemsex ‘epidemic’ within a socio-political context.

  Any research into chemsex is, by immediate default, compressed and obscured by the syndetic itself: ‘chemsex’. This compound word can become a reductive label which represses, omits, neglects, erases, and calcifies its participants.. It allows zero space for the user to articulate their trauma, shame, repression, vulnerability, abjection and resignation. My thesis will insist on the validity of a wider subjective experience as a method to understanding the complexities that surround user participation in chemsex.

  The outcome of this research project will consist of a creative work (70%) and a critical essay (30%).

• CLAU DI GIANFRANCESCO

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2021 onwards

  Title of thesis:

  Collective Practices of Undoing and Unbecoming: Masculinity and Theatre of the Oppressed

• TANIA BLACK

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Oct 2023 onwards

  Title of thesis:

  The use of the dramatic chorus: social and political expression through the use of Chorus in late Capitalist British Theatre.

• MARIA PATSOU

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor

  Title of thesis:

  Representations of mental illness in UK contemporary performance

Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

• ALEX LEGGETT

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Oct 2018

  Title of thesis:

  Quirky Dramaturgy in Contemporary UK Theatre: Autism, Participation and Access

  Awarded:

  2023

• 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 has taught across MA Text and Performance, BA Theatre and Drama/Theatre and English, and MA Dramaturgy. 

In 2023, he was awarded Birkbeck's Vice Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. 

Teaching modules

• Arts, Humanities and the Lifecycle 1 - Issues and Ideas (ARAR015S4)

Publications

Business and community

Outreach

In his capacity Director of Birkbeck Creative Practice Lab, Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre and formerly Director of BiGS, Professor Walsh routinely works directly with artists, the creative industries, activists and academics to engage a range of publics with the activities of the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication.

Walsh has organised or co-organised numerous symposia and international conferences at Birkbeck, recently including Performing Pandemic Grief: The Arts of Losing (2022); Contagious Theatre: Infectious Performance (2017); The Irish and the City (the Irish Society For Theatre Research annual conference, 2013). He has also conceived and chaired numerous public-facing panel discussions and workshops at Birkbeck, and programmed others via his directorship of Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre. 

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.