Dr Hannah Simpson
About
Dr Hannah Simpson’s research focuses on modern and contemporary theatre performance, with a particular interest in the playwright Samuel Beckett, contemporary British theatre, theatrical representation of physical pain and disability, and Northern Irish literature. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, she was educated at the University of Oxford and Boston University. She is also interested in the forgotten plays of modernist novelists including E.M. Forster, James Joyce, George Orwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway.
Expertise
- Theatre and performance
- Samuel Beckett
- Disability performance
- Contemporary British theatre
- Literature 1945-present
- World War Two literature
- Medical humanities
- Northern Irish Literature
Selected publications
- Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (forthcoming book, Palgrave)
- Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Witness: Pain in Post-War Francophone Drama (2022)
- Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (2021)
- Trying Again, Failing Again: Samuel Beckett and the Sequel Play (2021)
- Performing Northern Ireland: Stephen Rea in Cyprus Avenue and Hard Border (2020)
- Tics in the Theatre: The Quiet Audience, the Relaxed Performance, and the Neurodivergent Spectator (2018)
- Self-Expression, Agency and Directorial Control in W. B. Yeats’s and Samuel Beckett’s Theatre (2015)
Media experience
Dr Hannah Simpson has a variety of media experience including a discussion of Wilfred Owen on BBC Radio Oxford in 2019; plenary roundtable at the Samuel Becket in Confinement festival, Liverpool 2022, and recent podcast appearances on The Modernist Podcast, the Medical Humanities podcast, and The Nobel Prize for Literature podcast.
Languages
English, French