I am an art historian specialising in modern and contemporary visual and performing arts with a focus on avant-garde practices. I gained my PhD in History of Art from the University of Glasgow (UoG) in 2021. Following fixed-term lecturing positions in the School of Culture and Creative Arts (UoG), I am currently Research Associate on the European Research Council project, ‘Art and Policy in the Global Contemporary’ (POLART). POLART examines the relationship between art and policy through a double focus: an investigation of how the arts shape, steer, and reform public policy, and how, conversely, policy issues alter the artistic canon and forms of engagement. We view the sphere of artistic production, display, and consumption as a space for reflecting upon what it is to be in the world and considering policy problems.

In my practice-based work, I lead workshops on Dadaist performance strategies and contribute to the practice of Dada theatre to promote the ongoing relevance of avant-garde approaches to 21st century experience. Additionally, I have managed Erasmus+ funded projects and worked with several European and international organisations to promote education for disadvantaged and socially excluded communities.

Over time my interests in avant-garde culture have moved from historical studies of the European avant-garde (Dada and Surrealism) and single-author studies (co-founder of Dada, Tristan Tzara) to investigating the application of avant-garde praxis to contemporary social, cultural, and political issues. As an advocate for interdisciplinary research and practice, I am interested in exploring the arts at the intersection of other disciplines including social sciences, policy, science and technology studies, and quantum mechanics.

My current scholarship investigates the physical and conceptual location of art as a space for problematising policy issues. It explores embodied experience as a mode for activating new knowledge that is produced from the relationship between artworks, spaces, and viewers. This work is being realised in conjunction with the European Research Council project, POLART. 

My monograph, First Adventure to Final Flight: The Theatre of Tristan Tzara (Peter Lang, Art and Thought / Art et pensée) is the first scholarly volume devoted to the complete theatrical works of Tristan Tzara. With Stephen Forcer, I co-edited ‘Approximate Humanism’,  a special issue of Dada/Surrealism. (no.25) which brings together scholarship on avant-garde artists’ and writers’ interventions during and in the wake of WWII. For this volume, I prepared the first English language translation of Tristan Tzara’s The Flight (1946), a dramatic poem analogising the humanitarian crisis of WWII. This largely unknown text is here designated as an important work of social and political history. 

My upcoming publication (for Oceanic Avant-garde, Eds. Andrew McNamara and Ann Stephen, Brill) investigates the relationship between the European avant-garde and the arts of Australia. It looks at instances of appropriation in early 20^th century European avant-garde activities and those of contemporary First Nations Australian artists and activists. This research shows how avant-garde praxis is being innovated as a mechanism for care and how anger is being articulated positively in response to social and political discourses.

Between February and May 2023, with partners from the universities of Glasgow, Bucharest, Athens, and Aix-Marseille, I contributed to an Erasmus+ mobilities project, Care, Agency, Repair, Engagement (CARE), that shared research into (post)modernist cultural responses to social justice and ecological challenges. For CARE, I delivered workshops on avant-garde strategies applied to global concerns – inequality, social exclusion, and the climate emergency – that explored anger as a response that reinforces self-worth by showing that something we care about is worth getting angry about.

List by: Type | Date

Joint Funding

2021: Erasmus+, Project Funding. €248,960.00 to support project number 2020-1-UK01-KA226-VET-094440: An innovative approach to reduce the Digital divide in Vocational Education and training (ADVANCE). In collaboration with SWAPWest. Awarded April 2021.

2019: Association for Art History, Research Grant. £1,000 to support the ‘Attention! Paris Dada’ symposium, October 2021. In collaboration with Kathryn Brown, Loughborough University. Awarded October 2019. 

2019: Society for French Studies, Conference Grant and Workshop Awards Scheme. £1,000 to support the ‘Attention! Paris Dada’ symposium, October 2021. In collaboration with Kathryn Brown, Loughborough University. Awarded October 2019. 

Individual Funding

2023: University of Glasgow, School of Culture and Creative Arts, Research Support Fund. £748.14 to support Avant-Garde Action in Indigenous Australia research development. Awarded May 2023. 

2019: Collaborations and Cultural Activities Committee, College of Arts, University of Glasgow. £511 to support the ‘Attention! Paris Dada’ symposium, October 2021. Awarded December 2019.

2019: Research Training Support Grant, University of Glasgow. £487 to present at the Association for Art History Annual International Conference, Brighton. 4 – 6 April 2019. Awarded February 2019. 

I welcome applications for projects related to my areas of research. See Research Interests and Publications for further details.

PhD supervision: Kfir Lapid Mashall, ‘Introducing “Judicial Theatre” as the Performance of Theatrical Mock Trials’.

I have taught across a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Theatre Studies and History of Art focussing on theory, global art, modern and contemporary visial and performing arts, and the avant-garde. 

Selected Conference Papers

2024: ‘Conflict and Migration in Tristan Tzara’s The Flight,’ Avant-Garde and War, European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies’ 9^th International Conference, Kraków. September 2024. 

2023: ‘Approximate Humanism in Tristan Tzara’s The Flight,’ Glasgow Theatre Seminars. University of Glasgow. March 2023.   

2022: ‘An innovative approach to reduce the digital divide in education and training,’ Lifelong Learning for Inclusion and Sustainability Conference, University of Glasgow. June 2022.

2021: ‘Performing the impossible in the theatre of Tristan Tzara,’ Attention! Paris Dada, Loughborough University. October 2021.

2021: ‘Duchamp’s Quantum Door,’ Rethinking the Histories and Legacies of New York Dada, Loughborough University. October 2021.

2019: ‘The Body between Text and Performance in the Theatre of Tristan Tzara,’ Association for Art History Annual International Conference, Brighton. April 2019.  

2018: ‘Theatrical Surrealisms: Tristan Tzara and Paris Dada performance,’ Realisms of the Avant-Garde, European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies’ 6^th International Conference, Münster. September 2018.