Dr Kathryn Kate Flaherty

PhD (English) Sydney; MA (Theatre Studies) Leeds; BA Hons (English) Sydney
Senior Lecturer in English and Drama
ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences
T: +612 6125 7024

Areas of expertise

  • Literary Studies 2005
  • Drama, Theatre And Performance Studies 190404

Research interests

What in the world do plays do? What happens when imaginative plots touch our present concerns through the embodied experience of performers and audiences? With Shakespeare as an expansive test case, I investigate how drama functions on the stage of public culture.  My first book, Ours as we play it: Australia plays Shakespeare, examines contemporary Australian performance. In other books, articles, and chapters I analyse theatrical touring, theatrical rivalry, civic disorder, sectarian tension, military commemoration, and education through their intersections with Shakespeare in 19th and early 20th-century contexts. I am currently working on a book entitled Moving Women: The Touring Actress and the Politics of Modernity. 

 

Researcher's projects

Moving Women: The Touring Actress and the Politics of Modernity

Actresses were the first class of female workers to travel on a global scale. In the nineteenth century, the scale of their experience of public life put pressure on emerging definitions of the female 'role'. However actresses are rarley regarded as major players in the political scene. This book will reveal the  ways in which touring actresses engaged through their repertoires and their writing with the politics of labour, suffrage, gender and abolition.

 

Reading Riot through Shakespeare

How is a riot begun? Structured? Spread? The Reading Riot through Shakespeare Project will contribute new answers to these urgent question. Its international, inter-disciplinary team of researchers are using Shakespeare-associated riots to better understand the imaginative and performative dynamics of public disorder. 

Current student projects

Barbara Taylor (current PhD student)

The Materiality and Performance of Magic in Shakespearean Romance

Lucy Boon (current PhD student)

Queer-daptation: A practice as research study of John Lyly's Galatea and William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure

 

 

Past student projects

Imogen Wall MA

A Girardian reading of The Comedy of Errors

Luisa Moore PhD

Textual Critique Through the Artist's Eye: John Austen's Illustrated Hamlet

Elizabeth Beaton PhD 

The Shakespearean Political Influence in Epic Fantasy

 


Publications

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Updated:  29 March 2024 / Responsible Officer:  Director (Research Services Division) / Page Contact:  Researchers