Updated September 2023
The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre is now out and about. It has been a lot of work and covid/life/the world has caused so many ups and downs. But we are so proud of the eventual collection and so grateful to our patient contributors.
We are excited to see the journal articles from the Health and Wellbeing in Professional Wrestling project (funded by the British Academy) emerging. The first appeared a few months back. The second is now out with Survive and Thrive in the next couple of months. Last April I gave an invited paper as part of a symposium on Proxies (run by Dylan Mulvin of LSE and Annette Hill of Lund University). After having so much fun with bodybuilding last year, Conor Heffernan and I are collaborating on a paper thinking about proxies in wrestling and how a study of wrestling might make us think about a range of contemporary proxies in different ways.
I'm delighted to be working with Conor and Broderick Chow on a new project on the history of Strongman. We have some wonderful partners and long to receive the money so we can speak to Strongmen and Women about their experiences (and maybe do a bit of stonelifting ourselves). The paper I delivered last year at the British Society for Sports History conference in 2021 is now an article for a special edition of Performance Research on blood and will be coming out soon, all being well.
I am also co-leading the Loughborough participation in the Arts, Culture and Heritage theme for the new Civic Agreement between the University of Leicester, De Montfort University and Loughborough University. We had an amazing, inspiring launch a couple of months ago and I am really excited to discover new ways to work together to promote the arts in Leicestershire and Rutland. My collaboration with the APPG for professional wrestling continues: we are now putting together documentation to support wrestlers, schools, trainers, medics and referees. The highlight of the year (and maybe life) was to get mentioned in Hansard.
The first half of this year, I've been finishing off a whole heap of things in readiness to start my Fellowship (Loughborough's version of a sabbatical). It is my first period of research leave since 2012 and I am very excited to be committing some months to projects, development, collaborations...and rest. During this I have a few speaking arrangements: at the Putting Myself in the Historical Narrative event at the University of Oxford; the Medical Humanities and Sport and Exercise Sciences Dialogue at Durham University; and at the Modernist Studies Association Conference in Brooklyn in October, our first US jaunt since Covid. I am writing lots of words of a new monograph provisionally entitled Muscular Modernisms.
As I continue to work with our students, fulfil a number of leadership roles within our School, and just try to be a supportive colleague, I am inspired by Maya Angelou's advice: "Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud". May we be rainbows in people's clouds in 2023...
The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre is now out and about. It has been a lot of work and covid/life/the world has caused so many ups and downs. But we are so proud of the eventual collection and so grateful to our patient contributors.
We are excited to see the journal articles from the Health and Wellbeing in Professional Wrestling project (funded by the British Academy) emerging. The first appeared a few months back. The second is now out with Survive and Thrive in the next couple of months. Last April I gave an invited paper as part of a symposium on Proxies (run by Dylan Mulvin of LSE and Annette Hill of Lund University). After having so much fun with bodybuilding last year, Conor Heffernan and I are collaborating on a paper thinking about proxies in wrestling and how a study of wrestling might make us think about a range of contemporary proxies in different ways.
I'm delighted to be working with Conor and Broderick Chow on a new project on the history of Strongman. We have some wonderful partners and long to receive the money so we can speak to Strongmen and Women about their experiences (and maybe do a bit of stonelifting ourselves). The paper I delivered last year at the British Society for Sports History conference in 2021 is now an article for a special edition of Performance Research on blood and will be coming out soon, all being well.
I am also co-leading the Loughborough participation in the Arts, Culture and Heritage theme for the new Civic Agreement between the University of Leicester, De Montfort University and Loughborough University. We had an amazing, inspiring launch a couple of months ago and I am really excited to discover new ways to work together to promote the arts in Leicestershire and Rutland. My collaboration with the APPG for professional wrestling continues: we are now putting together documentation to support wrestlers, schools, trainers, medics and referees. The highlight of the year (and maybe life) was to get mentioned in Hansard.
The first half of this year, I've been finishing off a whole heap of things in readiness to start my Fellowship (Loughborough's version of a sabbatical). It is my first period of research leave since 2012 and I am very excited to be committing some months to projects, development, collaborations...and rest. During this I have a few speaking arrangements: at the Putting Myself in the Historical Narrative event at the University of Oxford; the Medical Humanities and Sport and Exercise Sciences Dialogue at Durham University; and at the Modernist Studies Association Conference in Brooklyn in October, our first US jaunt since Covid. I am writing lots of words of a new monograph provisionally entitled Muscular Modernisms.
As I continue to work with our students, fulfil a number of leadership roles within our School, and just try to be a supportive colleague, I am inspired by Maya Angelou's advice: "Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud". May we be rainbows in people's clouds in 2023...
