"Dirty Queers", Dr. Bryony White's new book and her first non-fiction title, has been acquired by Serpent's Tail Press. A queer cultural history, the book has been described as "fabulously erudite", and is set to be published in Spring 2026.

Dr. Bryony White, Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies and Director of Graduate Studies at Warwick's Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, has won the 2023 TaPRA Early Career Researcher Award for her article in the Summer issue of the peer-reviewed Art Journal, 'Returning to The Scene of the Crime: Gendered and Racialized Violence in Ana Mendieta's Rape Scene'.

Dr David Coates has worked with Nicola Allen (Archivist at Woburn Abbey) to set up a Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) with the Bedford Estates. This means that they have secured a funded PhD position to start in October 2024. The project that they will co-supervise will interrogate the complex relationships between theatre and the aristocracy in the long nineteenth century. There is flexibility in the CDA's design, enabling the chosen candidate to find their own area of interest within this broad topic. They're now looking for prospective candidates to apply for the position, and David would be delighted to hear from anyone interested (D.J.Coates@warwick.ac.uk). Full details on the project can be found by clicking on this news story.

A new book by Dr. Julia Peetz, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Performance and Politics at the Department for Theatre and Performance Studies, Performance, Theatricality and the US Presidency - The Currency of Distrust, has been published by Edinburgh University Press. At a time when the issue of lying in politics has assumed a new saliency on both sides of the Atlantic, the book proposes a new, interdisciplinary perspective on the contemporary rise of mainstreamed populism by exploring features of populist-style politics through the lens of distrust.

Dr. Peetz argues that, rather than being a flaw or corruption, the potential for political distrust must be understood as an essential feature of representative democracy because representation works through performance. The book explores performance as a constellation of factors: scripts, embodiment, ideas of selfhood, and historical norms and ideals. It draws on key scholarship of political representation, rhetoric, and populism; on theories of performativity, theatricality, and acting; and on interviews the author conducted with political speechwriters spanning presidential administrations and campaigns from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama to demonstrate both that distrust is inherent in representative politics and that in mainstreamed populism distrust becomes a focal point around which the theatre of politics revolves.

Going beyond well-worn and simple theatrical metaphors to describe political action, Julia Peetz’s new book offers a sophisticated – and genuinely interdisciplinary - blend of performance and political analysis. Readers will find compelling new approaches to, and arguments about, crucial factors in political life, from legitimacy and representation to distrust, authenticity and populism. The book’s in-depth engagement with the past and present of US presidential performance is both illuminating and insightful. – Michael Saward, University of Warwick