People

This collaborative project is led by Stuart Andrews and Patrick Duggan. More information on our work can be found below. Prospective doctoral candidates can find more information on opportunities for postgraduate study by contacting us here.

Dr Stuart Andrews

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I am interested in the ways we understand, practise and manage the places around us. As a Co-director of Performing City Resilience, I work with emergency planners, culture directors, organisations and companies to develop creative approaches to emergency planning. This collaborative work has led individuals, local authorities, companies and organisations to think in new ways about their work and to revise key policies and procedures, as demonstrated in New Orleans (USA).

I have published internationally on arts, architecture, culture, emergency and resilience planning, performance, and place. Publications comprise books and academic articles, professional reporting and blog posts. Currently, I am working with Patrick Duggan on two new monographs for Louisiana State University Press and Palgrave. At Brunel University London, I am engaged in interdisciplinary research and teaching on place, performance, and resilience.

Within academic institutions, I have led research, learning and teaching, and associated areas at subject, department and/or school level. Roles have focused particularly on facilitating research and research impact development, designing and managing degree programmes, and growing international partnerships.

Dr Patrick Duggan 

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I am interested in why we (still) make theatre and performance: what is it for, what does it do culturally, politically, socially, aesthetically? Within this overarching frame, my research interests lie in critical approaches to contemporary performance and the relationship between performance and the wider socio-cultural and political contexts in which it is made. I am interested to look not only at contemporary aesthetic practice, but also at events in everyday life that we might analyse as and frame through performance. As such, my research might engage with a protest or a carnival parade, a politician’s speech or an installation hanging of a painting, a theatre play or the representation of a particular event in news-media.

My work is engaged with poststructuralist and political philosophy, is determinedly interdisciplinary in nature and particularly focused on questions of performance in situations of social crisis, spectatorship, witnessing, and trauma and ethics. Within this frame, I explore the socio-political efficacy of theatre, performance and other cultural practices.