Research Interests - David Pattie

I have a number of concurrent research interests: I have published on the work of Samuel Beckett, on contemporary theatre and performance, on Scottish theatre, on performance and popular culture, and on popular music. If there is a theme which runs through much of the research that I have published, it is into the relationship between performance and the construction of identity, whether that identity is constructed by nationality, or by the generic expectations contained within the performance event itself.

I have co-organised two international conferences on the work of Samuel Beckett, at the University of Westminster in 2002 and at the University of Leeds in 2003; The Leeds conference attracted a range of internationally known experts in Beckett Studies (S.E. Gontarski, Lois Oppenheim, Enoch Brater, David Bradby). I was invited to contribute to two collections of essays on Beckett, published by Palgrave and by Blackwells, and edited by two internationally known Beckett scholars (Lois Oppenheim and S.E. Gontarski); I was invited to contribute to a collection of essays on British and Irish theatre in the 20th Century (edited by Mary Luckhurst for Blackwells); and I was invited to co-edit an edition of the Journal of Beckett Studies on Beckett’s TV work. I was a keynote speaker at the 6th Annual AEDEI conference, at the University of Valladolid in Spain in May 2006.

I am currently supervising two PhDs: one on the Berlin music/performance art group Einstanzende Neubaten, and the second on the jazz scene in Chester between the 1940s and the 1970s. A third, on the linkage between performance and national identity, is currently going through its preliminary stages.