Professor Dennis Kennedy

Dennis Kennedy is Emeritus Professor and Fellow in Trinity College Dublin, where he held the Samuel Beckett Chair of Drama from 1994 to 2006. His books include The Spectator and the Spectacle: audiences in modernity and postmodernity (2009), Shakespeare in Asia: contemporary performance (edited with Yong Li Lan, 2010), and The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance (2010, revised edition 2011). Other works include The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance (2 vols., 2003), Looking at Shakespeare: a visual history of twentieth-century performance(second edition, 2001), Foreign Shakespeare (1993), Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre (1985), and Plays by Harley Granville Barker (1987). He was an advisory editor for The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2001). His novel, Fossil Light, was published in 2023. His latest book, Creating Jesus, is a literary and historical approach to the gospel of Mark, and is due to be published in 2024. His essays have appeared in numerous books and journals and he has delivered papers and lectured widely on theatre and performance subjects around the world, from Los Angeles to Shanghai and from St Petersburg to Kyoto. Previously he was Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh, and has held distinguished visiting professorships at the University of California Santa Barbara, the Chinese Central Academy of Drama, the National University of Singapore, the Salzburg Seminar, McMaster University, the University of Victoria, and the University of Wisconsin, and was Senior Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Karachi in Pakistan. In 2010 he was a Fellow at the international research institute "Interweaving Performance Cultures' in Berlin. He has twice been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the USA, twice won the Freedley Award for theatre history, received the Chancellor's Distinguished Research Award at the University of Pittsburgh, the Berkeley Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin, and is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and the Academia Europaea (the Academy of Europe). He has organized major international conferences in New York, Dublin, and Singapore, including the large-scale Beckett Centenary Symposium in Trinity College Dublin in 2006. His own plays have been performed in New York, London, and at regional theatres across the US, and he has frequently worked as a dramaturg at such theatres as the Long Wharf in New Haven, the Lyric Hammersmith in London, and the Shaw Festival in Canada. He also works as a professional director and gives workshops in acting Shalespeare around the globe. In 2005 he directed Shakespeare's As You Like It at the Chinese Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, and in 2006 directed and designed Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle in Dublin. He also writes fiction; his short stories have been published in numerous literary magazines and journals.

  Dramatic/Theatre Arts   History and theory of the spectator   History of scenography and directing   Interculturalism   Performance Theory   Performing Arts   Political theatre   Theatre History

Theatre and performance history and theory, especially in 19th and 20th century Europe. History and theory of the spectator. Shakespeare in performance. Scenography (stage design). Theatre directing and dramaturgy.