Collaborative Research

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

I am interested in the ways performance practice and research can help us 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/implement creative strategies in response to local and global challenges. This collaborative work has led these partners to think in new ways about their work and to revise key policies and procedures, as demonstrated in New Orleans (USA) and the UK.

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. In August 2025, Patrick Duggan (below) and I published Performing New Orleans: Rethinking Resilience in Art and Everyday Life (Louisiana State University Press) and we are currently developing a new book for Palgrave.

Within academic institutions, I have held leadership roles in research, partnership development, and learning and teaching at subject/department/school level. I focus particularly on facilitating research and research impact development, designing and managing degree programmes, and brokering partnerships. In my current work at Brunel University of London, I support Arts and Humanities colleagues enhance the impact of their research, lead the Brunel BA Theatre degree programme, and teach modules on performance, place, and resilience on programmes including the MA in Wargaming and Resilience Planning.

Professor Patrick Duggan

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 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.

I have held various academic leadership roles throughout my career, including: Director of Research for the School of Arts, and then the GSA, at the University of Surrey (2015-19); and, Head of Film, Media, Theatre and Performance at Northumbria University, Newcastle (2020-25). Currently, I am Head of Winchester School of Art, and Professor of Performance, Culture, and Resilience, at the University of Southampton (UK).