Lucy is on research leave from June 2023 until January ​2025

Dr Lucy Weir is a specialist in dance and performance. She is the author of Pina Bausch's Dance Theatre: Tracing the Evolution of Tanztheater (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), Performance, Masculinity, and Self-Injury (Routledge, 2024), and co-editor of the essay collection Performance in a Pandemic (with Laura Bissell – Routledge, 2021). Her new book, What Moves Them: A Global History of Modern Dance will be published by Allen Lane in 2025, and is based on research supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. 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, and promoted to Reader in 2024. 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 has co-convened SEXES, a cross-ECA research cluster involving early-career researchers and senior faculty in the fields of gender and sexualities, since 2018. 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​

• What Moves Them: A Global History of Modern Dance (Allen Lane, forthcoming 2025)
• Performance, Masculinity, and Self-Injury (Routledge, 2024)
• 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
• 2023 CAHSS Challenge Investment Fund
• 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​​