Keynotes
Lynette “Lennox” Goddard
Lynette “Lennox” Goddard is Professor of Black Theatre and Performance at Royal Holloway, University of London. Their teaching and research documents and analyses contemporary Black British theatre through the politics of race and representation and the careers of performers, playwrights and directors. Their publications include Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics Performance (Palgrave, 2007), Contemporary Black British Playwrights: Margins to Mainstream (Palgrave, 2015) and Errol John’s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (Routledge Fourth Wall, 2017). They co-edited Modern and Contemporary Black British Drama (Palgrave, 2014) and the play collections The Methuen Drama Guide to Plays Black British Writers (2011) and Black British Queer Plays and Practitioners: An Anthology of Afriquia Theatre (Methuen, 2022). They are currently planning their next book on Black activist theatre and co-editing three collections: the two-volume Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century British Theatre and The Cambridge History of Black British Theatre and Performance.
Fintan Walsh
Archives and Afterlives: Performing Grief in Pandemic Theatres
While queer theatre and performance are largely considered to be niche cultural forms, in many countries, queer and trans lives, laws and practices continue to occupy central positions in social and political debate. How do contemporary queer theatre and performance defy charges of irrelevance, marginality and disposability to assert their wider contributions to social, political and cultural life? This lecture explores how digital and in-person queer theatre and performance responded to the Covid-19 pandemic and its ongoing impact, by evolving new forms that drew on its old archives of grief, to help navigate the turmoil of the period and its aftermath. How might the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic mark a turning point in the reanimation of queer culture and its theories, this lecture asks, via their resurgence, transposition and extended application?
Fintan Walsh is Professor of Performing Arts and Humanities and Head of the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication at Birkbeck, University of London. Recent books include Performing Grief in Pandemic Theatres (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Performing the Queer Past: Public Possessions (Methuen Drama, 2023) and the anthology Writing Queer Performance: Contemporary Texts and Documents (Methuen Drama, 2025). He is a former Senior Editor of Theatre Research International.
