Dr. Nicholas Johnson

Nicholas Johnson is Associate Professor of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, where he has worked full-time since 2008. He co-founded the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies, within which he co-directs the Beckett Summer School and the Samuel Beckett Laboratory. With Jonathan Heron (Warwick), he co-authored the monograph "Experimental Beckett" (Cambridge UP, 2020) and co-edited the "Performance Issue" (23.1, 2014) and "Pedagogy Issue" (29.1, 2020) of the Journal of Beckett Studies. He co-edited two volumes of essays from the Beckett Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research: "Influencing Beckett / Beckett Influencing" (L'Harmattan, 2020) and "Beckett's Voices / Voicing Beckett" (Brill, 2021). He has published widely in journals and edited collections on adaptations and intermedial performances of Beckett, directing and acting Beckett, Beckett and censorship, and the use of performance as a tool for research. A secondary research interest, and the topic of a monograph now in progress, relates to how theatre laboratory work can generate new knowledge for more interdisciplinary contexts in a wide range of fields. Johnson has undertaken numerous practice-based research projects since 2008, including collaborations with literature scholars, art historians, educators, translators, sociologists, historians, computer scientists, and medical clinicians in which performance has played a crucial role. As convenor of the Creative Arts Practice college-wide research theme, and as committee member of both the Neurohumanities and Medical and Health Humanities initiatives at TCD, Johnson's research is extending the role of theatre and performance in these alternative settings. Johnson is a literary translator (from German), with current and past projects on Toller, Kafka, Frisch, Trakl, and Brecht, including the first translation and publication of Brecht's "David" Fragments from 1919-21 (Bloomsbury, 2020). These translation projects signal a further research interest in German Expressionism during the Weimar period, and more widely in modernism's legacy. Johnson continues to direct, perform, and work as a dramaturg in a variety of theatre contexts in Ireland, Germany, and the UK, and he gives talks and workshops worldwide. He has held visiting research positions at Freie Universität Berlin and Yale University.

  American theatre, playwriting   Dramatic/Theatre Arts   Modern and contemporary German drama and theatre   Political theatre   Samuel Beckett   Theatre Practice

I have spent the last decade publishing on Beckett in performance, directing Beckett projects internationally, and contributing to the scholarly infrastructure of international Beckett Studies. These activities culminated in the 2017 establishment of the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies to consolidate our research, integrating the Samuel Beckett Laboratory, a space founded in 2013 by myself and Jonathan Heron (Warwick) for fundamental research into Beckett in performance, with the Samuel Beckett Summer School that I co-direct, now in its tenth year. How Beckett is received, taught, and understood is being expanded by the work that we do on experimental, intermedial, intercultural, and other forms of "applied" Beckett, and the international reach of the Summer School makes a public contribution as well. With Jonathan Heron, with whom I co-edited the 2014 "Performance Issue" and 2020 "Pedagogy Issue" of the Journal of Beckett Studies (23.1 and 29.1), I co-wrote "Experimental Beckett: Contemporary Performance Practices" for the new "Elements in Beckett Studies" series at Cambridge University Press (2020). Drawing on insights from this research into Beckett and the theatre laboratory, in recent years my work has pivoted to more interdisciplinary research projects in the areas of pedagogy (with Education), acting theory (with Neuroscience), VR and AI (with Computer Science), cultural trauma (with Sociology), and medical humanities (with both Medicine and Nursing/Midwifery). In my capacity as convener of the Creative Arts Practice research theme, I have discovered many opportunities to extend the impact of my "disciplinary" insights from within Drama. I am a literary translator (from German), with current and past projects on Brecht, Toller, Kafka, Frisch, and Trakl. These translation projects signal a further research interest in German Expressionism during the Weimar period, and more widely in the aesthetics and philosophies of modernism in the twentieth century. I am the co-editor of the forthcoming "Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre" (2022).