Dr Mark Taylor-Batty
Principal Investigator
Mark is an internationally recognised expert in the field of Pinter scholarship. He is the author of three books on Harold Pinter’s work, holds an executive role in the International Harold Pinter Society, and participated in advising Harold Pinter on – as well as assisting to construct – the web-site devoted to his work (http://www.haroldpinter.org/).
Dr Basil ChiassonResearch Fellow
Basil researches on Harold Pinter and contemporary British drama and performance. He has contributed to The Theatre of Harold Pinter, Modern Drama, The Pinter Review and Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter. He has authored one book, The Late Harold Pinter: Political Dramatist, Poet and Activist, which will be published later this year. This study employs affect theory to refine and develop existing definitions of what makes Pinter’s work political. It is the first book-length study of Pinter’s later political dramas, poetry and activism. Basil also has research interests on how neoliberalism and austerity politics come to bear upon the dramatic arts. Prior to joining the Harold Pinter: Histories and Legacies team Basil taught in Theatre Studies and English programmes on the history of theatre, modern drama and contemporary British theatre and performance.
Professor Graham Saunders
Co-investigator
Graham is an internationally recognised authority on post-war British theatre and has experience working on archival holdings related to two major AHRC projects on the work of the Arts Council of Great Britain and the reception of Samuel Beckett in the UK & Ireland.
Dr Catriona FallowResearch Fellow
Before joining the Harold Pinter: Histories and Legacies project, Catriona worked as a Teaching Fellow at the in the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. Broadly, her research specialises in contemporary British and European playwriting, theatre history, historiography and archival studies, and contemporary Shakespearean performance. She recently completed her PhD at Queen Mary University of London where she also worked as a Teaching Associate. Catriona’s work has been published in Studies in Theatre and Performance, and has been presented internationally at Harvard’s Mellon School for Theatre and Performance Research, Performance Studies International, and the International Federation for Theatre Research.
Professor Jonathan Bignell
Co-investigator
Jonathan has led funded research on five previous AHRC collaborative grants in television historiography and has studied British television drama with extensive use of archive sources, also working with media industry professionals. His leadership roles include Trusteeship of Reading’s world-leading Beckett archive and networks specializing in research into media history.
Dr William Davies
Postdoctoral researcher
William Davies researches on twentieth-century literature and culture with a special interest in the literature of the Second World War. He completed his PhD in 2018 and, before joining the Pinter project, he was a Samuel Beckett Research Centre Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Reading. He has taught at the University of Reading and Oxford Brookes University. He publishes and presents regularly on the work of Samuel Beckett, with articles in Journal of War and Culture Studies, Journal of Beckett Studies, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, and book chapters in several edited collections. His forthcoming monograph, Samuel Beckett and the Second World War, explores the effects of Beckett’s war-time experiences on his work. He is the co-editor of Samuel Beckett and Europewith Niamh M. Bowe and Michela Bariselli, Beckett and Politics (forthcoming) with Helen Bailey, and The Poetry of Samuel Beckett (forthcoming) with James Brophy. He also works on post-1945 English poetry and has published on the poet-critic Donald Davie in Review of English Studies.
Dr Amanda WrigleyPostdoctoral researcher
Before joining the AHRC-funded Pinter project, Amanda was Mid-Career Research Fellow in the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (2016-17) and Research Fellow on the AHRC-funded ‘Screen Plays: Theatre Plays on British Television’ project and its impact at the University of Westminster (2011-2017). Dr Wrigley is interested in 20th-century British radio and television engagements with theatre plays (especially ancient Greek) and with humanities topics more broadly as educational programming for schools and the Open University; she also works on BBC Radio features by literary figures such as Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas.
Dr Billy SmartPostdoctoral researcher
Billy previously worked as Research Officer on ‘Forgotten British Television Drama, 1946-82’ at Royal Holloway (2013-17) and ‘Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style’ at Reading (2010-13). Work has included studies of the development of Scottish and Welsh television drama, TV representations of lesbianism in 1970s drama, dramas made on Outside Broadcast, the work of the BBC Audience Research Unit, the changing visual form of soap opera and how the theatrical conventions of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht and J.B. Priestley were altered by studio practice when adapted for television.