Catherine joined Loughborough University in 2007, straight after her PhD at Aberystwyth University, which focused on the contemporary playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh. She is Director of Postgraduate Taught Studies.
Catherine's main research activity is in the field of contemporary British and Irish Theatre. She has published widely on the plays and films of Martin McDonagh, and also on the work of Harold Pinter and Sarah Kane. Her main research interest is in theatre and gender, nationalism, political theatre, and applied theatre. She is the author of four monographs - on theatre and adaptation, the plays of Harold Pinter, contemporary British Drama - and another monograph on the topic of Martin McDonagh, which is published by Routledge.
She is currently working on a fifth monograph - Applied Theatre for Health and Wellbeing - for Routledge.
Her research in applied theatre includes working on interdisciplinary projects with external partners to explore the effectiveness of applied approaches to eating behaviour, typically in care home settings with older adults.
Catherine has taught a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules at Loughborough, including:
Languages of Theatre; Research Project; How to Read a Play; Textual Studies; Textual and Historical; Performance; Contemporary. Irish Theatre; Group Practice; Applied Drama; Theatre and Education; Gender and the Stage; Theatre Practice (student performances of a Pinter double, Attempts on her Life, Enron and The End of Men); Revolt Against Fate: Theatre and Literature of the Absurd; Theatre, Nation and Trauma: Contemporary Irish Theatre; Creative Arts in Education; Eternal Drama; Dissertation supervision.
Masters teaching and convening includes: Arts Management; Placed-based Performance; Major Project; Modern and Contemporary Texts in Performance; History, Nation, Difference; Theatre and Theory; Dissertation supervision.
Catherine is currently supervising the following PhD projects:
- Virtullage - Posthuman Artforms and Lost-Carried Maternal
- The Well(-Being) of Wonderment: Seeking a Simple Recipe for Everyday Enchantment Through Story-Speaking
- Re-inventing Indian Oral Traditions and Storytelling: Evolution of storytelling in Yerukala and Irula tribes: Two of the Oldest Tribes of South-India
- Education and Storytelling: a practical investigation of the impact of applied storytelling on academic attainment and wellbeing in secondary education
- How the balance of sound affects a theatre audience: Do dynamics, tempo and tonal balance effect the emotion and behaviour of an audience?
- Visual Storytelling: Migration and Movement During War Time: An investigation into the visual storytelling in the context of mass migration of humans and artistic ideas during the current Russian-Ukrainian war
- Bodies in Flux: Posthuman drag arts and performers in the digital age
PhD students supervised to award:
- Drawing home - A phenomenological journey of drawing in, through and with the spaces of home
- Beckett and Being: A Phenomenological Ontology
- Japanese Otome Bunraku and the Materials of Puppeteer Presence