Job title: Chancellor's Fellow

Email: lucy.weir@ed.ac.uk

Office address: Room O.45, Higgitt Gallery, Hunter Building

Contact time: By appointment

Research outputs: Dr Lucy Weir on Edinburgh Research Explorer

Lucy is on research leave from June 2023 until September ​2024

Dr Lucy Weir is a specialist in dance and performance. Her monograph, Pina Bausch's Dance Theatre: Tracing the Evolution of Tanztheater (2018), is published by Edinburgh University Press. She is editor of Performance in a Pandemic (Routledge), a collection of essays looking at the impact of Covid-19 on theatre, dance and live art across the UK. She is completing a new book (under contract with Routledge) exploring masculinity and self-injury in performance practice. In 2020, Lucy was named an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker, and she contributes to various programmes on Radio 3.

Lucy obtained her PhD in History of Art and Theatre Studies from the University of Glasgow in 2013. She taught at Glasgow School of Art for five years in the Forum for Critical Inquiry. In 2015, she was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (University of Edinburgh), before taking up a Teaching Fellowship in Modern and Contemporary Art. In 2021, Lucy was appointed Chancellor's Fellow in History of Art. She completed her Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice at the University of Edinburgh in 2018, and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Lucy and Benoît Loiseau co-convene SEXES, a cross-ECA research cluster involving early-career researchers and senior faculty in the fields of gender and sexualities. She sits on the steering committee for the University's Gender.ED network. Along with Bev Hood (School of Design), Lucy co-established the Performance Studies Network at Edinburgh. She convened 'Scotland's Cultural Landscape: Nation, Heritage and the Arts,' an international summer school jointly hosted by the University of Glasgow and the Hunterian Museum in partnership with Hong Kong University.

Lucy maintains a strong interest in the performing arts alongside her academic research. She is a Visiting Lecturer in Dance at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. In 2022, she joined the Board of Trustees of the Beacon Arts Centre in Greenock.

 

Publications​

  • Staging Self-Injury: Performance, Masculinities and Self-Inflicted Violence (Routledge, forthcoming)
  • Performance in a Pandemic, co-edited with Laura Bissell (Routledge, 2021)
  • Pina Bausch's Dance Theatre: Tracing the Evolution of Tanztheater (Edinburgh University Press, 2018)
  • ‘Not So Black and White: Frederick Ashton’s “outsider” ballet,’ in 4 Saints in 3 Acts: A Snapshot of the American Avant-Garde in the 1930s, ed. Allmer and Sears (Manchester University Press, 2017) 
  • ‘Abject Modernism: Interpreting the Postwar Male Body in the Works of Tatsumi Hijikata, Günter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler,’ Tate Papers, no. 23 (Spring 2015)
  • ‘Audience Manipulation? Subverting the Fourth Wall in Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof (1978) and Nelken (1982),’ The Scottish Journal of Performance, vol. 1, issue 2 (June 2014)
  • ‘Primitive Rituals, Contemporary Aftershocks: Evocations of the Orientalist ‘Other’ in Four Productions of Le Sacre du printemps,’ AVANT, vol. 4, no. 3 (December 2013)
  • ‘Re-reading Mary Wigman’s Hexentanz II,’ co-authored with Lito Tsitsou, The Scottish Journal of Performance, vol. 1, issue 1 (December, 2013)

 

Awards and Grants

  • 2023      Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship
  • 2020      AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker
  • 2019      SGSAH Cohort Development Fund (Modernist Methodologies network)
  • 2018      ESRC Festival of Social Science Event Award (with Dr Amy Chandler)
  • 2015      IASH Postdoctoral Fellowship
  • 2013      AHRC Postdoctoral Internship, Glasgow Life
  • 2012      Whistler Travel Scholarship
  • 2012      University of Glasgow College of Arts Research Support Award
  • 2011      DAAD Research Grant
  • 2011      AHRC Research Training Support Grant
  • 2010      AHRC Doctoral Award​​

Lucy is on research leave 2023-24, and will not be teaching.

Lucy's teaching reflects her diverse research interests, and her classes encourage students to challenge art historical assumptions and notions of canonicity.

Her current Honours options include The Art of Revolution: A Century of Russian Visual Culture (third year), The Performative Turn: Performance and Live Art Since 1945 (fourth year), as well as the MSc elective course What Moves Them: Dance and Performance Art Since 1913. She is course organiser of the History of Art/Fine Art Work Placement programme. Lucy also lectures on subject matter from Futurism to Fluxus for History of Art 2, and on feminism and queer theory for the Research Theories and Methods MSc core course.​​

​​​​Lucy's research interests encompass performance art and dance, feminist and queer theory, subculture and identity, and mental health.

Current PhD students

PhD Supervision Topics

Accepting applications.

  • Performance studies - live art, dance, theatre
  • Queer culture
  • Soviet visual culture
  • 'Outsider' art