Personal statement

CJ is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Research Support Office at Bath Spa University, where they are currently supporting a project to map research, knowledge exchange and scholarship informed teaching across the university curriculum. They provide project-based support and guidance for publicly engaged research and have developed a university Public Engagement Toolkit in collaboration with academic and professional services colleagues across Bath Spa.

CJ is currently undertaking a Postdoctoral Impact Fellowship funded by Bath Spa's AHRC Impact Accelerator Account. Their project, 'Building transgressive knowledge of the body', in collaboration with freelance theatre-makers explores embodied resistance as mode of trauma-informed emotional access and artist safeguarding in and beyond performance practice. The project builds on their doctoral research on dramaturgies of disruption and artist-centred practice in the adaptation and staging of canonical texts.

CJ's academic work is informed by their practice as a freelance director, playwright and performer, in which they specialise in queer and feminist new writing and stage adaptations of early modern texts.

CJ is currently developing a monograph on 'Shakespeare and Trans Identity in the Twenty-First Century' which will present trans readings of Shakespeare texts and performance through a lens of contemporary trans and non-binary experience.

Academic qualifications

  • PhD, ‘“These signs forerun the death or fall of kings”: Renegotiating masculinities and centrality in Shakespeare's second tetralogy through adaptation, direction and performance’, Bath Spa University, 2024
  • Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Bath Spa University, Distinction, 2021
  • MA, Performing Shakespeare, Bath Spa University, Distinction, 2015
  • BA, Drama Studies and Creative Writing, Bath Spa University, 2:1, 2014.

Professional memberships

Other professional roles

  • Creative Director, Apricity Theatre
  • Freelance theatre director, performer and playwright.

Areas of expertise

  • Performance for stage and screen
  • Shakespeare
  • Adaptation
  • Dramaturgy
  • Theatre directing
  • Gender and embodiment
  • Queer and feminist performance
  • Performance sociologies
  • Masculinities
  • Public engagement
  • Research and knowledge exchange in teaching.