Professor Adrian Curtin

I am a theatre scholar and educator. I am Head of Subject for Drama in the Department of Communications, Drama and Film.

My main research areas are Western drama and theatre associated with modernism and its legacy, the use of sound and music in experimental theatre, and connections between Western classical music and theatre.

My first monograph, Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (Palgrave, 2014), concerns sonic experimentation by avant-garde theatre artists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and shows how artists engaged with the sonic conditions of modernity through innovation in dramatic form, characterisation, language, staging, technology, and performance style. This book was supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme grant. I won the 2015 Early Career Research Prize, awarded by the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA), for this book.

My second monograph, Death in Modern Theatre: Stages of Mortality, approaches modern theatre from a different angle, focusing on the ways in which dramatists and theatre-makers have explored historically informed ideas about death and dying in their work. It examines the opportunities theatre gives us to reflect on the end of life in a compelling and socially meaningful fashion. A reviewer in Modern Drama nominated it as 'the best monograph on drama and theatre studies [they had] read in at least five years'.

I am co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). This collection highlights modernism as an impulse that can be carried forward to the present, re-embodied and re-encountered in theatrical performance. A diverse set of contributions from scholars and theatre practitioners examines the legacy of modernism on the world stage in acts of remembrance, restaging, transmission, and slippage.

I was principal investigator of the AHRC research network Representing 'Classical Music' in the Twenty-First Century from 2019 to 2021. This network explored contemporary artistic and media representation of classical music as well as demographic representation in the classical music industry. I have co-edited a special collection of the Open Library of Humanities on this topic.

In 2022 I was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to work on a research project and a programme of public engagement about theatrically oriented orchestral performance. In this year-long fellowship (which commenced in January 2023), I examined music-making that challenges conventional understanding of the orchestra, of musicians as performers, of borders between art forms, and of orchestral repertoire. A project blog is available here. A monograph resulting from this research, entitled The Theatrical Orchestra: British Music Ensembles Experiment with Performance, will be published by Manchester University Press in 2025.

I am the editor of the Anthem Impact in Dramatic Criticism book series (forthcoming).

Biography:

I joined the University of Exeter in 2012, having previously worked at the University of Lincoln. I did my doctoral training at Northwestern University, where I was a Presidential Fellow, and completed the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama programme in 2011. I have also studied at Boston College and University College Cork. I am originally from Cork, a city full of hills, and now live in another city full of hills.

Research supervision:

I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students on any subject relevant to my research expertise. If you are interested in working with me, please send a 500-word outline of your proposed research topic, along with a CV.