• Lecturer (Theatre Film and Television Studies)

telephone: 01413306129
email: Katie.Gough@glasgow.ac.uk

Office hours: Tuesday 11-1pm

Research Interests

Katie’s research has two strands: the first is an interest in the construction of Atlantic Historiography, particularly the historical and contemporary relationships between the Caribbean, U.S. South and Ireland as they are manifested in analogous political and cultural movements in the nineteenth and twentieth century (including, but not limited to, the relation between anti-slavery in the Americas and anti-colonialism in Ireland; historical re-enactments; Carnival; dramatic literature and dramatic adaptation; political protests in Ireland, the Caribbean and Southern US during the mid-twentieth century).

A related strand is theoretical and involves the construction of interdisciplinary methodologies that can be thought together through performance studies. Katie is particularly interested in intermediality (reading one medium through another) as a strategy of thinking through how objects (journalism and print media, stage performances, photographs, architecture, and television) can be employed to write Atlantic historiographies that do not elide the place of female social actors who are often ‘produced’, and are made ‘real’,  through these various technological regimes.

In a more general capacity, her research and teaching interests involve 19th and 20th century intercultural and popular performance; postcolonial drama and theory; gender theory; performance theory; theories of mimesis; critical race theory. She teaches courses in Performance Theory and Analysis; Dramaturgy and Playwriting; Hemispheric Performance in the Americas; Postcolonial Theatre; and  Melodrama and Blackface Minstrelsy in a Transatlantic Context.

Research Projects

Katie is currently completing a monograph entitled Haptic Allegories: Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic.

Haptic Allegories advances an innovative and compelling approach to writing comparative studies of performance in trans-national, intercultural relation. It intervenes into long standing debates regarding the cultural and political intersections of African and Irish diasporic peoples and movements as they touch and move each other in the Black and Green (Irish) Atlantic. By examining the unlikely kinship between social actors such as Ida B. Wells and Maud Gonne; Lady Augusta Gregory and Zora Neale Hurston; and Bernadette Devlin and Alice Childress, along with a host of old and new theatrical “characters,” this study begins by elucidating the elision of both gender and performance in Black and Green Atlantic Studies, and argues that both provide key analytic methods for revising the social and cultural historiography of the field. By examining how attention to gender and performance revise historiographical practices, Haptic Allegories also revises, reimagines, and redeploys key concepts central to performance studies: the restoration of behavior (Richard Schechner), circum-Atlantic surrogacy (Joseph Roach), the relationship between the archive and the repertoire (Diana Taylor), and theories of reenactment (Rebecca Schneider). In turn, it argues that paying attention to the dramaturgy of the figure of woman in movement as it is ‘played out’ in historiographical practice, moves the currents of trans-national, intercultural historiography in the Atlantic in new directions.   

This research was funded through the generous support of the AHRC Early Career Research Fellowship.

• AHRC Early Career Research Fellowship, 2011 (£42K)

Katie would welcome applications from MPhil or PhD students who wish to pursue interdisciplinary research on the relationship between theatre/performance and sound, architecture, film, photography and art historiography; intercultural performance; -performance in the Circum-Atlantic world; dramaturgy and historiography; and interdisciplinary investigations related to history, memory, technology and performance.

Current students:

• Steve Collins:  Ghanaian Folklore and International Copyright Law (PhD with School of Law)
• Allison Macleod:  The Construction of Queer Space & Masculinity in Irish Film (PhD with Film Studies)
• Kieran Hurley:  'Training for Action: The performing body as an agent for change' (PhD Theatre Studies)

Recently completed:

• Steve Collins:  'Playwriting and Policy in Post-Independence Ghana' (MPhil)
• Flora Pitrolo:  'FAC, UT ARDEAT COR MEUM: an Experiment in Listening to Visual Theatres' (MPhil)
• Clare Louise Duffy:  'Practice as Research: Writing a Queer Aesthetic' (PhD)
• Allan Rennie:  Documentary Film, Authenticity and the Real (MPhil)

External Responsibilities

In 2008 Katie was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Centre for Irish Studies and taught in the Department of History at Concordia University in Montréal.

Conferences and Invited Talks (since 2008)

• Keynote Speaker, ‘Between the Words: Zora Neale Hurston’s Syncopated Rhythm and Tender Mapping’, Sound-Thought Symposium, The Arches & University of Glasgow, 3 March 2012
• Research Seminar, ‘Between the Image and Anthropology: Theatrical Lessons from Aby Warburg’s “Nympha”’, Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Creative Art, University of Glasgow, 23 Feb 2012
• Conference Paper, ‘Haptic Allegories: Regimes of Memory in the Atlantic World’, Performance Studies International, Utrecht, Netherlands, May 2011
• Performer and Collaborative Devising Partner (with Four Second Decay), ‘Gaps in Memory: Pop-Up Performance’, Performance Studies International: Camillo 2.0, Utrecht, Netherlands, May 2011
• Invited Speaker, Roundtable on theatre, performance and celebrity in the early modern and modern Anglo-Atlantic world; in honour of the John Edward Taylor Visiting Fellow, Professor Joseph Roach (Yale), University of Manchester, 10 March 2011
• Performer in ‘Uncle Falling,’ a pair of lyric lectures by poet, essayist and translator, Anne Carson, William Matthews Memorial Lecture, Birkbeck College, University of London, 22 March 2011
• Invited Speaker, ‘Commodities who speak: Gender, History, Performance’, Performance-Minded Symposium, University of Glasgow, December 2010.
• Invited Speaker, ‘Whose “folk” are they anyway?: Zora Neale Hurston and Lady Augusta Gregory in the Atlantic World’, Centre for Irish Studies, National University of Ireland, Galway, November 2010
• Invited Speaker, ‘“Authenticity” and Performance: the troubling “origins” of the Irish and Harlem Renaissances’, American Studies Research Series, University of Manchester, October 2010
• Invited Speaker, ‘Whose “folk” are they anyway?: Zora Neale Hurston and Lady Augusta Gregory in the Atlantic World’, AHRC Research Network, ‘W[h]ither the Atlantic World?: The American South in Atlantic Context’, University of Cambridge, May 6-8, 2010
• Invited Speaker, ‘Natural Disaster, Cultural Memory: Montserrat adrift in the Black & Green Atlantic’, Caribbean Discussion Group, University of Glasgow, 19 May 2009
• Keynote Speaker, ‘Jumping Scales in Performance Studies: thinking through the nature-culture divide’, Public Arts Initiative on Performance and Ecology, School of Drama, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, 26 March 2009
• Public Lecture, ‘The Black Atlantic in the Irish Imagination: History, Memory and Performance on the Contemporary Irish Stage’, Concordia University, Centre for Canadian Irish Studies, Montréal, Québec, 20 November 2008
• Invited Speaker, ‘The Black Atlantic in the Irish Imagination’, North East Irish Culture Network (NEICN), University of Sunderland, U.K., 22 May 2008
• Conference paper, ‘Kinship Trouble: Gendered Commodities and Transnational Performance’, Performance Studies International Conference, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, August 2008
• Invited Speaker, ‘The Black Atlantic in the Irish Imagination’, North East Irish Culture Network (NEICN), University of Sunderland, U.K., 22 May 2008.