Dr Karen Quigley
Faculty Interdisciplinary Teaching Lead and Senior Lecturer

Profile

Biography

I am Head of Theatre, Faculty Interdisciplinary Teaching Lead and incoming Programme Director for BA Liberal Arts. I work across the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, supporting our undergraduate and postgraduate communities as they develop dynamic approaches to performance, interdisciplinarity, and creative practice.

I teach modules on BA and MA programmes in Theatre and Liberal Arts, as well as supervising PhD research students. As a lecturer and supervisor in these contexts, I always aim to encourage the development of practical theatre thinkers and thoughtful theatre practitioners. Moving fluidly between the lecture room and the studio space, I explore ways of thinking, talking, playing and making theatre that are constantly engaging with their critical, political and cultural contexts.

My research addresses questions of performance process and unstageability across contemporary British and Irish theatre practices. I am co-author and co-editor of Research and Development in British Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2025) alongside Tom Cantrell, Katherine Graham, and Mark Love-Smith, and the author of Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure (Bloomsbury, 2020), which examines the boundaries of representation and staging. My broader published work spans a number of disciplines, exploring contemporary performance, site-based practices, and performance in screen and literary contexts, with essays appearing in Performance Research, Studies in Theatre and Performance, and in edited volumes with Routledge and Manchester University Press.

Prior to joining York in September 2014, I was Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Chester (2011-2014). Originally from Ireland, I completed my BA Drama and Theatre Studies at Trinity College Dublin, followed by an MA Text and Performance at RADA / King’s College London, and a PhD in the English Department at King’s College London.

Publications

Selected publications

Books

• Research and Development in British Theatre, co-authored and co-edited with Tom Cantrell, Katherine Graham and Mark Love-Smith (London: Bloomsbury, 2025)
• Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure, (London: Bloomsbury, 2020)

Journal Articles

• ‘Palliative Architectures: Approaches to description in Lost Lear and Hamnet’ in Performance Research 31:4 (forthcoming)
• ‘Departure Points: Beginning training in site-based performance practices’ in Studies in Theatre and Performance, 9:2 (July 2018)
• 'Offering Resistance: Unstageable Stage Directions in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed’ in European Drama and Performance Studies, hors-série (special edition) (2017)
• 'Letting the truth get in the way of a “good” story: Spectating solo and Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke’ in Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 4:1 (2016)

Book Chapters

• ‘Warped virtuosity and wobbly visuals: skill-learning in R&D’, Research and Development in British Theatre, co-authored and co-edited with Tom Cantrell, Katherine Graham and Mark Love-Smith (London: Bloomsbury, 2025)
• ‘“A few scenes of humble life”: theatre-making in the novels of Louisa May Alcott’, The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction, ed. Graham Wolfe, (London: Routledge, 2023)
• ‘“You’ve got to expect this kind of thing in the priesthood”: simplicity and complexity in Father Ted, Moments in Television: Simplicity/Complexity, ed. Sarah Cardwell, Lucy Donaldson and Jonathan Bignell, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022)

Research

Overview

My research looks at several interconnected strands across modern and contemporary performance practice. At its core, my work investigates questions of staging and unstageability, exploring how impossibility, representation and the limits of performance shape how we think about making theatre. This interest in theatre-making processes extends to my research on R&D methodologies in contemporary British theatre, alongside projects examining sound, voice and music in performance. Additionally, my scholarship explores site-based performance and feminist pedagogies, and ways of using autoethnographic and reflective methods to analyse theatre and performance.

Selected Research Projects

1. Research and Development in British Theatre

In collaboration with colleagues across the School of Arts and Creative Technologies, I co-led a project examining Research and Development (R&D) as a distinct theatre-making methodology. Drawing on practitioner documentation and industry interviews, this work frames R&D as an independent, generative creative practice rather than merely a preliminary rehearsal phase. This culminated in the co-authored/co-edited volume Research and Development in British Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2025).

2. Voice, Ecology, and Sustainable Arts Practice

My most recent funded research focused on vocal practice, community wellbeing and regional arts ecologies. Across the below three projects, I worked with a range of participants and stakeholders, including people who believe they can’t sing, recent theatre graduates and professional theatre makers.

• YorVoice / Sparks Programme (2024-25): Principal Investigator for 'Love Your Voice' (£21765).
• York Impact Accelerator Fund (2024-25): Lead Applicant for 'Building a More Sustainable Artist Ecology in York' (£8000).
• Knowledge Exchange Fund (2022-23): Lead Applicant for 'Healing the Performing Arts' (£8,000).

3. Unstageability and European Theatre Histories

In 2016-18, supported by a Visiting Fellowship at An Foras Feasa (Maynooth University) and a trans-European workshop at Université Grenoble Alpes, this project investigated moments of unstageability in European drama since the 1860s. This work proposed a counternarrative to conventional histories by focusing on how impossibility shapes theatrical form. My monograph Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure (Bloomsbury, 2020) establishes a theoretical framework for assessing unstageable stage directions and the limits of representation in contemporary performance.

4. Site-Based Performance, Feminist Pedagogies & Creative Practice

Supported by a HRC Rapid Response grant (£2,000) and pedagogic research funding in 2014-28, this strand explored site-based spectatorship and feminist approaches to creative practice in higher education. Related work included a major interdisciplinary production grant from the Athena SWAN Fund / Department of Theatre, Film and Television (£23,000) to commission, produce, and stage Space. Planets. Stars. (2018), a new play by Melanie Spencer performed at the York Festival of Ideas.

Supervision

Postgraduate Research Supervision

I welcome proposals from prospective doctoral students working across any of my areas of expertise, including contemporary theatre practice, performance methodologies, site-based practices, sound/voice in performance, and creative practice research.

Current Doctoral Supervision

• Sam Crane, PhD by Creative Practice in Performance Making
• Kasia Nicklin, PhD by Creative Practice in Filmmaking
• Liesa Refflinghaus, PhD by Creative Practice in Playwriting
• Gabrielle Russell, PhD by Creative Practice in Filmmaking

Completed Doctoral Supervision

• Dr Nick Newman, PhD by Creative Practice in Directing
• Dr Ishita Krishna, PhD by Research
• Dr Kiran Tanna, PhD by Creative Practice in Performance Making
• Sam Armstrong, MA by Research
• Dr Bridget Foreman, PhD by Creative Practice in Playwriting
• Nick Newman, MA by Research

Teaching

Undergraduate

I lead and contribute to modules across the BA Theatre, BA Liberal Arts.

Postgraduate

I lead and contribute to modules across the MA Theatre Making and MA in Creative and Cultural Industries.