Dr Kathryn Kate Flaherty
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
- Bush-Bailey, G & Flaherty, K, eds, 2021, Touring Performance and Global Exchange 1850-1960: Making Tracks, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, London.
- Flaherty, K & Lamb, E 2018, 'Introduction: Shakespeare and Riot', Shakespeare, vol 14, no. 3, pp. 199-204.
- Flaherty, K 2018, 'Lest we remember: Henry V and the play of commemorative rhetoric on the Australian stage', in G McMullan, P Mead, A G Ferguson, K Flaherty and M Houlahan (ed.), Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916-2016, Bloomsbury, United Kingdom, pp. 145-171.
- McMullan, G, Mead, P, Ferguson, A, Flaherty, K and Houlahan, M. eds, 2018, Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916-2016, Bloomsbury, United Kingdom.
- Flaherty, K 2017, 'Cathcart vs Brooke: a Touring Actress and a Trial of Public Private Identity in the Australian Colonies', New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 47-58.
- Flaherty, K 2017, Shakespeare plays and civic strife: the Julius Caesar fiasco is nothing new.
- Flaherty, K 2017, 'Shakespeare and Education: the Making of an Unlikely Marriage', in Jill L Levenson, Robert Ormsby (ed.), The Shakespearean World, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, Abingdon, UK and New York, USA, pp. 361-376pp.
- Flaherty, K 2016, ' "Damn him and the spikes": Richard III, riot, and the formation of an Australian colonial theatre public', Cogent Arts & Humanities, vol. 3, pp. 9pp.
- Flaherty, K 2011, Ours As We Play It: Australia Plays Shakespeare, UWA Publishing, Crawley Australia.
- Flaherty, K 2016, 'Hold your Fire: Utility, Play, and the Western Canon - A Response to Adam Kotsko', Australian Humanities Review, no. 60, pp. 182-185.
- Flaherty, K 2015, ''Dead as Earth': Contemporary Topicality and Myths of Origin in King Lear and The Shadow King', in Peter Holland (ed.), Shakespeare Survey: 68 Shakespeare, Origins and Originality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 221-233.
- Flaherty, K 2013, 'Habitation and Naming: Teaching local Shakespeares', in Kate Flaherty, Penny Gay and L E Semler (ed.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Centre: Australasian Perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., United Kingdom, pp. 75-85.
- Flaherty, K, Gay, P & Semler, L 2013, 'Introduction: Learning locally', in Kate Flaherty, Penny Gay and L E Semler (ed.), Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Centre: Australasian Perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., United Kingdom, pp. 1-6.
- Flaherty, K, Gay, P & Semler, L, eds, 2013, Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Centre: Australasian Perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., United Kingdom.
- Flaherty, K 2013, 'Monument Shakespeare and the World Stage: Reading Australian Shakespeare after 2000', in Richard Fotheringham and James Smith (ed.), Catching Australian Theatre in the 2000s, Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam The Netherlands, pp. 171-192pp..
- Flaherty, K & Lamb, E 2012, 'The 1863 Melbourne Shakespeare War: Barry Sullivan, Charles and Ellen Kean, and the Play of Cultural Usurpation on the Australian Stage', Australian Studies, vol. 4, p. 17.
- Flaherty, K 2011, 'Review: Veronica Kelly, The Empire Actors: Stars of Australian Costume Drama 1890s-1920s. Sydney: Currency Press, 2011', Association for the Study of Australian Literature Journal, vol. 11, no. 2, p. 4.
- Flaherty, K & Gay, P 2010, 'Finding local habitation: Shakespeare's Dream at play on the stage of contemporary Australia', in Christine Dymkowski and Christie Carson (ed.), Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, USA, pp. 229-247.
- Flaherty, K 2010, 'Review: Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson, ed. Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theatre Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008', New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 95-96.
- Flaherty, K 2009, 'As You Like It: Re-imagining Arden in Australian Space', Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 317-330.
- Flaherty, K 2008, 'More than Common Tall: Measuring Up to the Real Rosalind in Australia', 2006 Annual Conference of Australasian Association for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, ed. Ian Maxwell, Conference Organising Committee, Sydney, p. 14.
- Flaherty, K 2005, 'Theatre and Metatheatre in Hamlet', Sydney Studies in English, vol. 31, pp. 3-20.
