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 work at the intersection of culture, community, place, and resilience — exploring how arts and culture, community knowledge, and social infrastructure strengthen local, regional, and national planning for contemporary challenges.

As Co-Director of Performing City Resilience, I collaborate internationally with emergency planners, cultural leaders, government officials, and organisations to develop research-led strategic change. This work has helped partners reframe their approaches, revise policies and procedures, and build imaginative, locally situated responses to local and global pressures.

My publications span culture, emergency planning, urban resilience, architecture, and community responses to complex public challenges. As editor for The City series in Liminalities, an international, open access journal, I welcome expressions of interest for work that addresses and reimagines contemporary cities.

In universities, I have led research, partnerships, and learning and teaching. I specialise in supporting colleagues to enhance the impact of their research, designing and leading degree programmes, and brokering collaborations across disciplines and sectors. At Brunel University of London, I lead BA Theatre and teach on community, culture, place, and resilience, including on 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).