2011 speakers included:
Linda Ben-Zvi
is Professor of Theatre Studies at Tel Aviv University and Professor emerita, Colorado State University. She was named a John N. Stern Distinguished Professor at Colorado and was a Lady Davis Professor at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. She is president of the International Samuel Beckett Society, chair since 1996 of the Beckett Working Group of the International Federation of Theatre Research, and Editor of Assaph: Studies in the Theatre, the Tel Aviv University English language theatre journal. Her books include Samuel Beckett, and the biography Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times, which won the George Freedley Special Jury Prize, Theatre Library Association, 2006. She has edited Women in Beckett, Theatre in Israel, Susan Glaspell, Drawing on Beckett, Glaspell’s The Road to the Temple, Brecht: Philosophy and Performance (with Gad Kaynar), Staging Calamity (with Tracy C. Davis), Beckett at 100 (with Angela Moorjani), and is presently editing The Complete Plays of Susan Glaspell (with J. Ellen Gainor).
Matthew Causey
is senior lecturer in Drama in the School of Drama, Film and Music, TCD and holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University. He is director of the School of Drama, Film and Music’s Arts Technology Research Lab, a postgraduate research facility for art and technology. Before arriving at TCD he was Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, GA, where he served as principal investigator for the Performance Technology Research Lab, an interdisciplinary research centre for art and technology. Dr. Causey’s book, Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: from simulation to embeddedness was published by Routledge (2006). His theoretical writings on performance and techno-culture have been published in Theatre Journal, Theatre Research Int’l, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and TheatreForum among others. Dr. Causey is also a digital filmmaker and his most recent film, Frank and Marie, was an official selection of both the Boston Irish Film Festival and Dublin’s Darklight Digital Festival in 2004. As a theatre maker, Dr. Causey’s multi-media performance pieces have been produced throughout America and the Samuel Beckett Centre in Dublin, including his recent stage/video adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s television play, Ghost Trio.
Michael Colgan
is a film and television producer and also Director of the Gate Theatre, Dublin. In his 29 years at the Gate, he has produced many award-winning plays and festivals including four Pinter Festivals and six Beckett Festivals. Many of these productions have been seen throughout the world from Beijing to New York, Sydney to Toronto and London to Melbourne. In 2009 he produced a season of works by Brian Friel to mark the playwright’s 80th birthday. The plays opened at the Sydney Festival and later toured to the Edinburgh International Festival before returning to Dublin for a brief run at the Gate. For the Gate Theatre, he has previously directed Brian’s Friel’s Faith Healer starring Owen Roe and a stage adaptation of Beckett’s novella First Love starring Ralph Fiennes at the Sydney Festival 2007 and at Lincoln Center, New York. In 2006, Colgan was awarded the Irish Theatre Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts, and in 2007, he received the degree of Doctor in Laws from Trinity College, Dublin. In 2007, he was honoured with the title Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government and, most recently, received an OBE by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for services to cultural relations between the UK and Ireland.
Garin Dowd
teaches in the School of Art, Design and Media at the University of West London, where he is currently Reader in Film and Media. His most recent book is Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy After Deleuze and Guattari (Rodopi, 2007). His many essays on the work on Samuel Beckett, often written from a Deleuzian perspective, have appeared in a range of publications including the journals Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui, The Journal of Beckett Studies, and Forum for Modern Language Studies and in the edited collection Beckett’s Proust/ Deleuze’s Proust (Palgrave, 2009). He has also published widely on other topics, including a co-authored volume on the film director Leos Carax (Manchester UP, 2003), an edited volume, Genre Matters: essays in Theory and Criticism (2006) and journal articles on a range of authors and film directors. His most recent essays to be published include studies of Deleuze’s interest in the work of the film critic Serge Daney, on Deleuze and the films of Jacques Rivette and on Rivette’s Scenes de la vie parallele project. Forthcoming articles and chapters on Beckett and related topics will appear in Textual Practice, Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui and in two edited collections, Samuel Beckett in Context ( Cambridge Up, 2012) and Samuel Beckett and Pain (Rodopi, 2012)
Gerry Dukes
for many years lectured in Literature at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, where he was also a Research Scholar. He has published essays, reviews, and articles on modern Irish writing and visual art in Europe and the United States. He has published widely on Beckett’s work in The Journal of Beckett Studies, Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui, Irish Studies Review, The Recorder and elsewhere. His arrangement of Beckett texts with the actor Barry McGovern to script I’ll go on became a benchmark for Beckett stagings worldwide.
S.E. Gontarski
is Robert O Lawton Disgintuished Professor of English at Florida State University and holds a Ph.D. from Ohio State. He specializes in twentieth-century Irish Studies, in British, U.S., and European Modernism, and in performance theory. He has been awarded four National Endowment for the Humanities research grants, has twice been awarded Fulbright Professorships, has been Guest Editor of the following: American Book Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Modern Fiction Studies and most recently Drammaturgia. He is also General Editor of two book series: 1) Crosscurrents: Comparative Studies in European Literature and Philosophy with the University Press of Florida and 2) Anthem Studies in Theatre and Peformance with Anthem Press, London. He edited the Journal of Beckett Studies from 1989-2008, and currently serves as Co-Editor with its publication by Edinburgh University Press.
Judy Hegarty Lovett
has a Fine Art degree in Performance Art/Mixed Media and a postgraduate diploma in Dramatherapy. She worked as a photographer and set designer with a number of Cork theatre companies before joining the original Gare St Lazare Players in 1991 as an assistant to Artistic Director Bob Meyer. In 1996 she directed Conor Lovett in Molloy by Samuel Beckett in London and shortly thereafter the pair set up Gare St Lazare Players Ireland. Hegarty Lovett’s Beckett directing credits include Waiting for Godot, Rockaby and prose recitals of Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Lessness, Enough, Texts For Nothing, Worstward Ho, First Love and The End. In April 2006 for the Beckett Centenary Festival in Dublin, she directed new versions of Beckett’s radio plays as well as readings of Beckett’s prose and poetry by Tony Award Winner Anna Manahan and renowned Irish actors David Kelly and John Kavanagh. Hegarty Lovett’s notable credits also include a revival of Lessness at the National Theatre in 2001; a staged reading of The Great Hunger by Tom McIntyre at The Abbey Theatre in 2004; and a mask piece called Anseo at The Glucksman Gallery, Cork in 2005. Other non-Beckett directing credits include Bouncers by John Godber, The Possibilities by Howard Barker, The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter, Swallow by Michael Harding, Tanks A Lot (co-written by Hegarty Lovett and Raymond Keane), The Good Thief by Conor McPherson at the Rubicon Theatre and, most recently, GSLPI’s 2009 adaptation of Melville’s Moby Dick.
Nicholas Johnson
is an Assistant Professor in Drama at Trinity College Dublin, as well as a performer, director, and writer. He holds an acting degree from Northwestern University and a PhD (on the performance of Samuel Beckettʼs prose works) from Trinity College Dublin. Recent practice-based research projects on Beckett include his one-man show On Going On (Chicago 2003/Dublin 2006); Disjecta: A Samuel Beckett Laboratory (Samuel Beckett Theatre, 2007); Abstract Machines: The Televisual Beckett (ATRL, 2010); and Three Dialogues (ATRL, 2011). He has held a DAAD Fellowship to the FU Berlin, as well as a George J. Mitchell Scholarship and the inaugural Samuel Beckett Studentship in support of his work in Dublin. Since 2005 he has been artistic director of Painted Filly Theatre, an independent theatre company focused on new writing, with whom he began in 2009 on the long-term documentary project The Way of the Language, based on detainee transcripts from Guantánamo Bay (Bleecker Street NYC/Dublin Theatre Festival). Recent translation/directing work includes Ernst Toller’s Masse Mensch (Beckett Theatre/Volksbühne), K. — Stories and Fragments by Franz Kafka (Beckett), and Max Frischʼs Andorra (Beckett). He is deputy director of the Samuel Beckett Summer School.
Conor Lovett
trained at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. He has performed eighteen different Beckett roles in twenty-four productions worldwide, and his work with GSLPI has earned him a reputation as one of the world’s great Beckett actors. He played the role of Lucky in the 2003 revival of The Gate Theatre’s production of Waiting For Godot, directed by Walter Asmus, and performed in What Where and Acts Without Words 1 & 2 at The Barbican in London during The Gate’s London Beckett Festival in 1999. He has performed with Gare St Lazare Players since 1992 under the direction of both Bob Meyer and Judy Hegarty Lovett and in 2004 was again directed by Asmus in Beckett’s A Piece of Monologue in a Gare St Lazare/Rubicon co-production. Non-Beckett theatre roles include Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi, Joey in The Homecoming, Army in Requiem for a Heavyweight, Les in Bouncers, The Torturer in The Possibilities, Gus in The Dumb Waiter, the title role in Orpheus, Ed in Entertaining Mr. Sloane and The Narrator in Fabulous Beast’s The Bull. In 2007 he played David in Lucy Caldwell’s Leaves, a Druid/Royal Court Theatre co-production, which was directed by Tony Award-winner Garry Hynes. In 2007 he also worked with Peter Brook on a workshop towards his recent creation 11 or 12, and in 2009 he starred in GSLPI’s production of Moby Dick. For the screen Conor co-produced and starred in Shut Eye directed by Jon Tompkins. Other screen appearances include Intermission, Father Ted, L’Entente Cordiale, The Kings of Cork City, Small Engine Repair, Fallout and Moll Flanders.
Barry McGovern
is an actor and a former member of the RTÉ Players and the Abbey Theatre Company. He has worked in theatre, film, radio and television, as well as written music for many shows, and co-written two musicals and directed plays and operas. He was a board member and actor in the Beckett Festival which the Dublin Gate Theatre launched in 1991 in partnership with Trinity College Dublin and Radio Telefís Eireann, and which toured to New York in 1996 and London in 1999. He is known internationally for his award-winning one-man Beckett shows I’ll Go On and Watt which the Gate Theatre presented at the 1985 and 2010 Dublin Theatre Festival respectively.
Anna McMullan
is Chair in Drama Studies at Queens University Belfast. She has published many essays on contemporary Irish theatre and performance, and co-edited The Theatre of Marina Carr: “before rules was made” (Dublin: Carysfort Press, (2003) with Cathy Leeney. She is working on a book on Brian Friel to be published by Routledge in 2011. She is author of Theatre on Trial: The Later Drama of Samuel Beckett (Routledge, 1993) and co-editor of Reflections on Beckett: A Centenary Celebration with Steve Wilmer, University of Michigan Press, 2009. Her book on Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre and Media Plays will be published by Routledge in 2010.
Mark Nixon
is Reader in Modern Literature at the University of Reading, where he is also Director of the Beckett International Foundation. With Dirk Van Hulle, he is editor in chief of the Journal of Beckett Studies and Co-Director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. He is also an editor of Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui and the current President of the Samuel Beckett Society. He has published widely on Beckett’s work; recent books include the monograph Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936-37 (Continuum, 2011) and the edited collection Publishing Samuel Beckett (British Library, 2011). Forthcoming books include Samuel Beckett’s Library, written with Dirk Van Hulle (Cambridge UP, 2013), and the critical edition of Beckett’s short story ‘Echo’s Bones’ (Faber, 2014). He is currently preparing critical editions of Beckett’s ‘Critical Writings’ (with David Tucker; Faber) and Beckett’s ‘German Diaries’ (Suhrkamp), as well as The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature (with Ulrika Maude; Bloomsbury, 2015).
Sarah Jane Scaife
is an actor, director and scholar. In the 1980s she spent four years in New York studying mime with Stephan Niedzialkowski and dance with Eric Hawkins. She has performed in many plays in Dublin, mainly at the Abbey Theatre. She has also toured with them to Hong Kong, France and all over the United States. She has directed seven of Beckett’s plays at The Abbey Theatre (Peacock), to great acclaim. She was awarded funding by the Irish Arts Council to adapt Beckett’s prose work, Company for the stage, which was initially presented at the Project Theatre, Dublin and was subsequently invited to London, Glasgow and Galway. It was revived as part of Trinity College’s celebration of Beckett’s 90th anniversary in 1996, when Scaife also directed Barry McGovern in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, this double bill was then invited to Aarhus, Denmark as part of their Celtic Festival. In 1995 she founded her own company Throwin’ Shapes of which she was Artistic Director. Throwin’ Shapes received funding from the Kaleidoscope EU funding scheme, for developing an experimental approach to the works of Yeats and Beckett and presented two major productions in Dublin. Her other work with Yeats was as movement director and actress for the five year, International Yeats Festival at the Abbey Theatre, Director James Flannery. She is Adjunct lecturer in Drama for Trinity College Dublin and has taught Irish Theatre in Performance for NYU, Dublin for many years. Since 2000 she has directed Beckett’s work in Georgia and Mongolia and with Irish, English and American actors. In 2006 she was funded by the Irish Government to travel to India, Singapore, Malaysia, China and Greece to direct Beckett’s drama with theatre groups and actors in each country. In 2007 she was asked to represent Ireland in Tokyo to give a workshop and lecture on Beckett; she has been invited to many conferences internationally to speak about Irish Theatre in general and Beckett in particular.
Since 2009 she has been involved in an ongoing collaborative project with two Chinese institutions in Beijing, The Central Academy of Drama and the Beijing Foreign Studies University. This project has involved work on Irish plays both in Mandarin and English. The project has been supported by Culture Ireland and The Irish Literary Exchange, which brought translator Li Yuan to Ireland for the initial phase of her Mandarin translation of Marina Carrs’ By the Bog of Cats… This translation was presented by the students of the Beijing Foreign Studies University for the Shanghai Expo, 2010 and was published along with critical essays on Carr’s work by FLTRP, Beijing. Her production of Samuel Beckett’s Act Without Words 11 was first presented on the street at Christ Church, Dublin where many people that would not see Beckett’s work in a theatre setting were very moved by it. It was subsequently re-presented for the International Dublin Theatre Festival (2010) and Imagine Watford and Greenwich and Docklands Festivals (2011). It will also be played on the streets of New York, Theatre Alley, for the River 2 River Festival.
Sam Slote
is Associate Professor in English at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. He has co-edited five volumes on Joyce: Probes: Genetic Studies in Joyce (1995); Genitricksling Joyce (1999), How Joyce Wrote ‘Finnegans Wake’: A Chapter-by- Chapter Genetic Guide (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), Renascent Joyce (University of Miami Press, 2013), and Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts (SUNY Press, 2013). His annotated edition of Ulysses was published by Alma Classics in 2012. His writings on Beckett have appeared in the Journal of Beckett Studies, Samuel Beckett in Context, and Publishing Samuel Beckett. He is a Co-Director of the Samuel Beckett Summer School.
Dirk Van Hulle
is Professor of English Literature at the University of Antwerp’s Centre for Manuscript Genetics. He is the current president of the European Society for Textual Scholarship (ESTS), a trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation and an editor of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui. With Mark Nixon, he is co-director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP) and editor in chief of the Journal of Beckett Studies. He is the author of Textual Awareness (2004), Manuscript Genetics: Joyce’s Know-How, Beckett’s Nohow (2008) and The Making of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Stirrings Still’ and ‘what is the word’ (2011). He is co-author of Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge UP, 2013) with Mark Nixon, editor of Beckett’s Company (Faber and Faber, 2011), and with Shane Weller he has co-edited a genetic edition of L’Innommable/The Unnamable (2013), the second module of the BDMP (www.beckettarchive.org). He is currently preparing a monograph on Modern Manuscripts (Bloomsbury) and the second edition of the Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (Cambridge UP).
Shane Weller
is Professor of Comparative Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Modern European Literature at the University of Kent, UK. His publications includeA Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (2005), Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity (2006), and Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism: The Uncanniest of Guests (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
S.E. Wilmer
is Associate Professor in Drama at Trinity College Dublin and former Director of the Samuel Beckett Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies. He is the author of Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and (with Pirkko Koski) The Dynamic World of Finnish Theatre (Helsinki: Like Press, 2006). Other publications include Writing and Rewriting National Theatre Histories (Iowa University Press, 2004), (with John Dillon) Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today (Methuen, 2005), Beckett in Dublin (Lilliput, 1992), Portraits of Courage: Plays by Finnish Women (Helsinki University Press, 1997), (with Hans van Maanen) Theatre Worlds in Motion: Structures, Politics and Developments in the Countries of Western Europe (Rodopi, 1998) and National Theatres in a Changing Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). He is also a playwright and has been a member of the executive committees of the American Society for Theatre Research and the International Federation for Theatre Research.
Seminars
Beckett and Deleuze (Garin Dowd)
Beckett Reading Group (Gerry Dukes)
Beckett’s Manuscripts (Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle)
Beckett Performance Workshop (Sarah Jane Scaife)
The 2011 Summer School registered students in the GMB in Front Square of Trinity College Dublin from the afternoon of Sunday 10 July. Full programmes were distributed at that time. That office was also used for booking of public events.
samuel beckett summer school 