Performing (Post) Pandemic Grief: Prof Fintan Walsh

We are incredibly happy to invite you to join us for our next APS online reading group! We are delighted to welcome Fintan Walsh to present his research on the reckoning with grief in pandemic theatre.

Please join us to learn more about the vital contribution of theatrical performance to the ongoing work of public mourning in the wake of COVID-19.

In advance of the session, please access Prof Walsh’s new book: Performing Grief in Pandemic Theatres. The text is quite short but we especially invite participants to read sections 1, 4 and Coda.

Abstract:

This Element explores how theatre responded to the death and loss produced by the COVID-19 pandemic, by innovating forms and spaces designed to support us in grief. It considers how theatre grieved for itself, for the dead, for lost ways of living, while also imagining and enacting new modes of being together. Even as it reckoned with its own demise, theatre endeavoured to collectivise grief by performing a range of functions more commonly associated with funerary, health and social care services, which buckled under restrictions and neglect. These pandemic theatres show how grief cannot only be let mourn over individual losses in private, but how it must also seep into the public sphere to fight to save critical services, institutions, communities and art forms, including theatre itself.

Author biography:

Fintan Walsh is Professor of Performing Arts and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, where is the founding Director of Birbeck Creative Practice Lab and Head of the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication. His research focuses on theatre, performance and cross-disciplinary arts practice, with monographs including Performing Grief in Pandemic Theatres (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Performing the Queer Past: Public Possessions (Methuen Drama, 2023), Theatre & Therapy (Methuen Drama, 2013; expanded and reissued 2024), Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and Male Trouble: Masculinity and the Performance of Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Edited volumes include Writing Queer Performance: Contemporary Texts and Documents (Methuen Drama, 2025), Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary (Methuen Drama, 2020), That Was Us: Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance (Oberon Books, 2013), Performance, Identity and the Neo-Political Subject (with Matthew Causey, Routledge, 2013), Queer Notions: New Plays and Performances from Ireland (Cork University Press, 2010), and Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture (with Sara Brady, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Fintan is the founder and Senior Editor of the series Elements in Contemporary Performance Texts (Cambridge University Press) and is a former Senior Editor of the journal Theatre Research International (Cambridge University Press).