Dr Soudabeh Ananisarab

• Nineteenth and twentieth-century British and Irish drama
• Modern theatre
• Theatre history and historiography
• Theatre economics
• Iranian theatre

• PhD English. University of Nottingham. Thesis Title: Shaw and the Malvern Theatre Festival
• MA English Literature. University of Nottingham
• BA (Hons) English Language and Literature. Shahid Beheshti University

• TaPRA (Executive Committee member between 2021-2023)

Soudabeh’s research often combines theatre history with social, political and economic histories. Soudabeh has published on the dramatic writings of several nineteenth and early twentieth-century British and Irish playwrights, including Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, D. H Lawrence and Sean O’Casey. Soudabeh has a particular interest in regional theatre histories and she is working on her first monograph exploring Shaw’s relationships with the British regional repertory movement. Her work on regional performance histories also includes research on regional festival cultures. This builds on her PhD thesis which explored Bernard Shaw’s collaborations with the Malvern Festival during the interwar years. Soudabeh’s work often probes the interrelationships between the ‘local’, ‘national’ and ‘global’ in narratives of theatre history and she has adopted this approach to also publish on Iranian culture and theatre.

Soudabeh’s research has appeared in major journals, including Studies in Theatre and Performance (Taylor & Francis) and SHAW: Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies (Penn University Press) and she has chapters in several edited volumes, like The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in British Theatre and The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century British Theatre. Her work has also attracted research funding. She recently completed a Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas, Austin, funded by the AHRC International Placement Scheme as part of the research for her upcoming monograph.

Soudabeh is currently supervising students in modern and contemporary British and Iranian theatre, including two M4C funded PhD projects. She invites PhD inquiries in all aspects of nineteenth and early twentieth-century British and Irish drama as well as comparative studies with aspects of Iranian theatre and culture.

Books

Bernard Shaw and the British Regional Repertory Movement, Palgrave (in preparation).

Book chapters

‘The Biography in Performance’, in Sean O’Casey in Context, ed. by James Moran, Cambridge University Press (In Press).

‘Twentieth-Century Festival Cultures’, in The Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century British Theatre, ed. by Claire Cochrane, Catherine Hindson, Lynette Goddard and Trish Reid (October 2024).

‘Shaw and the British Regional Repertory Movement’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre, ed. by Adrian Curtin, Nicholas Johnson, Naomi Paxton and Claire Warden, Edinburgh University Press (June 2023)

‘Lawrence: An Intercultural Perspective’, in James Moran, Theatre of D. H. Lawrence, London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Journal Articles

‘In Pursuit of a New Theatre: The Case of the Malvern Festival’, in Studies in Theatre and Performance (Taylor & Francis, November 2021) https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.2006925>

‘Shaw in Mid-Twentieth-Century Iran’, in Shaw: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, 40.2 (Penn University Press, December 2020) < https://doi.org/10.5325/shaw.40.2.0147>.

'Candida', in The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume  1.2.1.08: English Writing and Culture of the early Twentieth Century, 1900-1945, first published July 2019.

‘Too True to Be Good at the 1932 Malvern Festival’, in Shaw: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, 38. 21 (Penn University Press, June 2018) < https://doi.org/10.5325/shaw.38.1.0048>.

 ‘John Millington Synge’, In Oxford Bibliographies in British and Irish Literature, ed. Andrew Hadfield. (Oxford University Press, 2017) < 10.1093/OBO/9780199846719-0125>

Reviews

Review: My Dear Loraine: Bernard Shaw's Letters to an Actor, ed. By L. W. Connolly, in Theatre Notebook, 75.1 (2021).

Review: Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics and the International Left, 1892-1964, Susan Cannon Harris (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), in International Yeats Studies (2018)

Review: George Bernard Shaw in Context, ed. by Brad Kent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) in Theatre Notebook, 71. 3 (2017).

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