DR CHRIS HAY

RESEARCH

My research interests are wide and varied, and draw on approaches from disciplines as diverse as theatre history and historiography, education, sociology, and performance studies. I am always interested in new interdisciplinary projects, and am usually juggling many ongoing projects at once. My research has been awarded prestigious awards, including the University Medal from the University of Sydney, and published in high-ranking journals such as Performance Research and Journal of Australian Studies. In 2022, the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies awarded the Marlis Thiersch Prize for Best Journal Article to my article “Philip Baxter: Man in Search of the Nuclear (St)age.”

From 2020 to 2023, I have been awarded an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), the most prestigious scheme for ECRs. This funding will allow me to concentrate full-time on my research for the full term of the award. Throughout this period, I am researching “The Origins of Live Performance Subsidy in Australia, 1949—1975", through the specific case study of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT). This project combines elements of my doctoral research with interests and discoveries I have developed since the award of my PhD.

My areas of research expertise include:

• Australian theatre and cultural history, in particular the pre-new wave period between 1949 and 1968;

• teaching and learning in creative arts education, including contemporary actor training;

• performance analysis, particularly the overlap of semiotic and embodied approaches;

• contemporary performance, especially the evolving role of the director;

• the Modernist movement in theatre, from its origins in nineteenth-century Germany to the High Modernism of the twentieth century;

• liveness and its centrality to the performance event; and

• everyday performances of gender and sexuality.