Notes on Contributors

Marjorie Brennan is a journalist who has written extensively on arts and culture for the Irish Examiner. She was, formerly, a parliamentary reporter in Dáil Éireann. She holds a Master’s degree in Digital Arts and Humanities from University College Cork, for which her main research topic was feminism and social media activism. She was a consultant and researcher on the RTÉ One documentary, Tribute: The Teresa Deevy Story. Based in Cork, she is originally from Waterford city.

Caroline Byrne is a theatre director. Previously, she was an Associate Director at the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill; she is an ongoing Education Associate at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and is, currently, Associate Director at the Abbey Theatre. Recent directing credits include: Dancing at Lughnasa (Gate Theatre); Portia Coughlan (Abbey Theatre); Spring Awakening (Young Vic Theatre); Faustus: That Damned Woman (Headlong, Lyric Hammersmith); Woman and Scarecrow (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art); All’s Well That Ends Well (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse); Katie Roche (the Abbey Theatre, National Theatre of Ireland); Oliver Twist (Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre); The Wheel (Milton Court Theatre); The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare’s Globe); Parallel Macbeth (Clare Theatre, Young Vic); Eclipsed (Gate Theatre, London); and, Shakespeare in a Suitcase (co-directed with Tim Crouch for the Royal Shakespeare Company). She has also directed productions at the Bush Theatre, the Bristol Old Vic, and the Birmingham Rep.

Amanda Coogan has been described by the Irish Times as the leading practitioner of performance art in Ireland. Her extraordinary work is challenging, provocative, and always visually stimulating. Her artworks encompass a multitude of media—objects, text, moving and still images, all circulating around her live performances. Her expertise lies in her ability to condense an idea to its essence and communicate it through her body. Her 2015 live exhibition, I’ll Sing You a Song from around the Town, was described by Artforum as ‘performance art at its best’. Amanda has collaborated with Deaf artists to realise two of Deevy’s works: Talk Real Fine, Just Like a Lady, an interpretation of The King of Spain’s Daughter, which was staged in the Abbey Theatre (2017), and the premiere of Possession, staged in Project Arts Centre, Dublin, and in The Granary Theatre, Cork, both in 2024.

Christa de Brún lectures in English Literature at South East Technological University. She holds a BA in English and Philosophy and an MA in Contemporary European Philosophy from University College Dublin, an MPhil in Anglo-Irish Literature from Trinity College Dublin, and a PhD in Literature and Education from Maynooth University. An academic and a poet, Christa has published in the fields of literature, critical consciousness, and education, and has a number of creative publications.

José Francisco Fernández is Professor in English literature at the University of Almería, Spain. His most recent work focuses on the narrative of Samuel Beckett and Beckett’s reception in Spain, including articles published in specialised journals such as Journal of the Short Story in English, Journal of Beckett Studies, AUMLA, Studi Irlandesi, and Arcadia, among others. He has also translated into Spanish four novels and four short stories by Samuel Beckett. He taught Anglo-Irish literature in the Master’s degree in English Studies at the National Distance Education University (UNED) and has been general editor of the journal Estudios Irlandeses.

Shonagh Hill is a Research Fellow (AHRC) at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) working on a project entitled ‘Feminist Temporalities in Contemporary Northern Irish Performance’. Prior to this, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at QUB. Shonagh’s monograph, Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre, published by Cambridge University Press in 2019, provides an historical overview of women’s contributions to, and an alternative genealogy of, modern Irish theatre. In 2022, she co-edited an anthology of plays with Lisa Fitzpatrick, Plays by Women in Ireland (1926–33): Feminist Theatres of Freedom and Resistance (Methuen). Shonagh has also co-edited a special issue of Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics entitled ‘Repealing the 8th: Irish Reproductive Activism’ (March 2022).

Alvean Jones is a member of the Irish Deaf community, serving on a multitude of committees, and is involved with adult and continuing education as an administrator, having worked for many years as a tutor. Alvean is secretary of the Deaf Heritage Centre Ireland, and has an abiding interest in history, and Irish Deaf history, specifically. In 2016, she co-edited a book on the history of St Mary’s School for Deaf Girls entitled Through the Arch to celebrate the 170th anniversary of that school. She has worked with Dublin Theatre of the Deaf since 1994 as an actor, writer, and director. In 2015, Alvean performed in Amanda Coogan’s RHA exhibition and in Coogan’s 2016 Belfast International Arts Festival production Run to the Rock. In May 2017, Alvean performed with Kate Romano in Ailís Ní Ríain’s play, I Used to Feel, which was staged for Cork Midsummer Festival and revived as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival in September 2018. Alvean collaborated with Coogan as a researcher, dramaturge, and performer contributing in multiple ways to You Told Me to Wash and Clean My Ears (2014) and to Talk Real Fine, Just Like a Lady (2017), both staged at the Peacock Theatre. Alvean performed in Death of the Innocents (2021) by the Belfast-based Deaf theatre company D’Sign Arts at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast. In 2024, she co-curated and performed in the premiere of Teresa Deevy’s Possession (2024), which was staged in Project Arts Centre, Dublin and The Granary Theatre, Cork. Alvean has created several videos translating historical articles and Irish Deaf history into Irish Sign Language and is currently working on an anthology of Irish Deaf history.

Eileen Kearney is a leading Irish theatre scholar and director. In the 1980s, her re-discovering of playwright Teresa Deevy prompted her to devote many years of her career to bringing Irish women playwrights to critical notice. She has directed productions and taught university theatre all over the United States, including Pomona College, Santa Clara University, Gonzaga University, Webster University, University of Texas in Austin, Texas A&M University, and University of Colorado Denver. At the playwright Patricia Burke-Brogan’s request, she directed the 2013 American premiere of Stained Glass at Samhain, which addresses the atrocities of the Magdalene Laundries. She acted in New York and Los Angeles before university teaching. She has published numerous articles in Irish and theatre journals, focusing on women’s contributions to the field. Her book, Irish Women Playwrights, 1908–2001 (co-edited with Charlotte Headrick), was published by Syracuse University Press in 2014, and is now in its second printing. She has been a member of American Conference for Irish Studies since 1985.

Dayna Killen graduated with a PhD from SETU, Waterford in 2024 having been awarded a WIT/SETU PhD Scholarship. Her doctoral thesis focuses on how four Irish women playwrights—Augusta Gregory, Eva Gore-Booth, Margaret O’Leary, and Teresa Deevy—found creative opportunities in navigating stereotypical representations depicting women as married mothers located inside domestic spaces. In that work, Dayna originated the term the ‘domesticated Irish woman’ to denote a gender representation popularised during the early decades of the twentieth century in Irish society, which the aforementioned playwrights interrogate in their creative work. Dayna, furthermore, investigates a developmental process whereby the behaviours, appearances, aspirations, and spaces occupied by Irish women playwrights and their contemporaries were shaped to fit idealised representations of women as domesticated Irish women. As a Fulbright awardee, Dayna studied at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at Notre Dame. Prior to undertaking her doctorate, Dayna completed an MSc in Global Financial Information Systems at SETU (then WIT) and obtained a first-class honours degree in Drama and Theatre Studies with English Literature from Liverpool Hope University.

Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin Mitchell is Associate Professor of Communications in the Kemmy Business School at the University of Limerick. Her current research focuses on intellectual and creative networks between 1880 and 1960, and she has a specific interest in cultural history focusing on publishing and book history, subscriptions, theatre management, and the creative industries in general. She works on the playwright Teresa Deevy, the Dun Emer Guild and Press, and the historian and activist Alice Stopford Green with recent articles appearing in the Journal of Victorian Culture, Women’s History Review, Irish University Review, and the Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing.

Kate McCarthy is Lecturer in Drama at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, South East Technological University (SETU). Her public engagement takes many forms, including: theatre practice, workshops, drama and theatre education projects, educational resources, public talks, and podcasts, as well as publications and conference contributions. Alongside co-authored publications on Teresa Deevy and contemporary regional theatre practice with Úna Kealy, she has co-authored book chapters and co-created educational resources about Waterford’s Magdalene Laundry and Saint Dominick’s Industrial School (with Jennifer O’Mahoney, SETU) and on drama education (with Marian McCarthy, UCC). As a practitioner, she facilitates and devises performances and drama education projects in Ireland and Britain. Kate is a co-researcher on the Lyrical Bodies Project and the Waterford Memories Project. She is the Policy and Advocacy Elected Member of the Irish Society for Theatre Research (ISTR) (2023–2026). 

Ciara L. Murphy lectures in Drama at Technological University Dublin. She has recently published her monograph Performing Social Change on the Island of Ireland: From Republic to Pandemic (Routledge, 2023). She is lead researcher on the national Safe to Create project, which aims to impact change on the culture and practices of the arts and creative sectors in Ireland to provide safer working conditions for all workers. She has published widely on contemporary Irish performance practice.

Hugh Murphy is Deputy University Librarian in Maynooth University where he completed his doctorate in early nineteenth-century Irish history. Previously, he led the Collections and Content Department in the Library, and it was in this post that he was responsible, with Chris Morash, for bringing the Teresa Deevy Archive to Maynooth. He has worked previously in University College Dublin Library and in the National Library of Ireland as well as lecturing in Information and Library Studies in UCD and book history and archival studies in Maynooth University. He has published in the areas of collection development, collection management, and library strategy, and has spoken nationally and internationally on these topics. Hugh is currently a member of the editorial board of the New Review of Academic Librarianship.

Lianne Quigley is an Artistic Director of Dublin Theatre of the Deaf (DTD). She is a Deaf activist and co-led the campaign for the legal recognition of Irish Sign Language (ISL). Lianne is Chairperson of the Irish Deaf Society, a Deaf-led civil rights organisation. She performed in and co-directed the Coogan/DTD collaborative project You Told Me to Wash and Clean My Ears (2014), directing the forty-strong, Deaf community cast. She wrote and directed I Have Spread My Dreams Under Your Feet: The Story of W.B. Yeats (2015), performed at the Deaf Village Ireland, and led the choreographic research in the Coogan/DTD collaboration, Talk Real Fine, Just Like a Lady (2017). Lianne has written, directed, and performed in DTD productions 1916 (2016) and Suffragette (2018), both performed at the Deaf Village Ireland. In 2020, with Alvean Jones, Lianne co-wrote and performed Letter 8, which was commissioned by the Abbey Theatre as part of the Dear Ireland series. In 2022, she worked with Amanda Coogan, Alvean Jones, DTD, Cork Deaf Community Choir, and staff and students of South East Technological University to devise a production of Teresa Deevy’s ballet Possession, which was performed in February in the Project Arts Centre, Dublin and in The Granary Theatre, Cork in June as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival, both in 2024.

Ann M. Shanahan is a scholar-artist specialising in feminist directing and pedagogy, gender and theatrical space, and theatre and social change. She has directed over sixty productions and writes about her own, and others’, directing practice. She is a Professor and Chair in the Department of Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to this appointment, she served as Artistic Director, and was Chair of the Department of Theatre at Purdue University, and served in the faculty in Theatre and Women’s Studies and Gender Studies at Loyola University Chicago for twenty years. Selected recent publications include: Landscapes of Perception: Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman (Methuen, 2023); ‘Making Room(s): Staging Plays about Women and Houses’, in Performing the Family Dream House: Space, Ritual and Images of Home (University of Iowa, 2019); ‘Teaching Maria Irene Fornés’s Fefu and Her Friends’, in How to Teach a Play: Exercises for the University Classroom (Bloomsbury Methuen, 2019); and ‘Pirated Pedagogy: Re-purposing Brecht’s Performance Techniques for Revolutions in Teaching’, in New Directions in Theatre Pedagogy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018). Ann is founding co-editor of the Peer-Reviewed Section of the SDC Journal (Stage Directors and Choreographers Society) and, from 2024–2030, is co-director of the Comparative Drama Conference (CDC), which will be convened in alternate years at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Shelley Troupe worked as an administrator for a diverse range of arts companies including the Irish Repertory Theatre and the National Asian American Theatre Company (both in New York City) as well as the Galway International Arts Festival and Youth Theatre Ireland. She completed her PhD at the University of Galway examining the ongoing partnership between two of Ireland’s key artistic contributors, Galway’s Druid Theatre (The Leenane Trilogy, DruidMurphy, DruidO’Casey) and playwright Tom Murphy (A Whistle in the Dark, Baileangaire, The House). Her research involves works that are off-canon and the ways in which life and historical events are reflected and refracted in theatrical production. Publications include essays/articles in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre, The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre, and Irish Studies Review.