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Theatre and Performance Studies

Dr Natalie Diddams

Assistant Professor

About

Natalie is an Assistant Professor within the School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures at the University of Warwick. She is an arts-based practitioner and researcher with a particular interest in socially-engaged and participatory theatre. Natalie holds a BA (Hons) in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick and an MA in Theatre Directing from St Mary’s University College, London. In 2020, she submitted her PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University, having explored the role of laughter and comedy within the fourth wave feminist movement.
Natalie is an experienced theatre director, workshop facilitator and dramaturg. Notable credits include Things Hidden Since the Foundations of the Earth (The Javaad Alipoor Company), B!RTH (Royal Exchange Theatre), and A Series of Metaphors Relating to A Plague (Home Manchester). As a dramaturg, Natalie was involved with the award-winning The Believers Are But Brothers, which toured internationally and has been made into a film for BBC Four. She is an Associate Artist of Trestle Theatre and the International Schools Theatre Association, and has a wealth of experience in theatre in education.
Through her research, Natalie has become a leading voice on the intersection between comedy, gender and contemporary politics, and regularly hosts workshops and performances aimed at empowering participants through stand-up. She is currently working on her first monograph, which will give an account of the methodologies that she has developed over the past 8 years. Alongside this, Natalie is a core member of the Mixed Bill Research Collective, which aims to explore under-researched aspects of comedy and humour.

Professional Associations

  • Member of the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA), 2021-Present. Organiser of the 2025 TaPRA conference, hosted by Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick (and co-opted onto the Exec 2024-2025).
  • Member of the Mixed Bill Research Collective. Organising committee for the ‘Comedy and Power’ conference at University of Sheffield in 2018, and for the ‘Comedy in Crisis’ conference at University of Birmingham in 2022.

Research interests

  • The function of comedy and humour within grassroots political movements.
  • The audience-performer relationship in stand-up comedy.
  • Posthuman approaches to laughter.

Publications

Diddams, N. (2022) ‘Laughter’ in Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts, Reason, M., Conner, L., Johanson, K. and Walmsley, B. (eds), Routledge.
Diddams, N. (2020) 'Making Waves: Comedy and Laughter as Fourth Wave Feminisms'. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.
Diddams, N. & Wilkie, I. (2020) ‘Waves of laughter: comic surfing on Bergson’s mechanical inelasticity’ in Comedy Studies, 12:1, 91-103, DOI: 10.1080/2040610X.2020.1850107
Diddams, N. & Rousell, D. (2020) ‘Fielding Hilarity: Sensing the Affective Intensit- ies of Comedy Education and Performance’ in Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance (25:3), pp 422-440, DOI: 10.1080/13569783.2020.1766951
Diddams, N. (2019) ‘The Guilty Feminist Army: A Podcast for a Refreshed Politics of Feminism’ in Conjunctions: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation (6:1), DOI: HTTP://DX.DOI.ORG./10.7146/TJCP.V6I1.117257