Research Interests

• The cultural settings of modern Irish drama, at home and abroad
• Book in progress is The Life of the Neighborhood Playhouse on Grand Street, an institutional and performing arts history, in contract to Syracuse University Press, of a 1920's attempt in New York City to link high art and social activism, largely through the work of a series of Irish plays by Shaw, James Joyce, Lord Dunsany, Yeats, and others.

Select Publications

• The Irish Play on the New York Stage, 1874-1966. Irish Literature, History, and Culture. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.
• Editor (with sociologist Elizabeth Mitchell). Politics and Performance in Contemporary Northern Ireland. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.
• ‘The Early Years and the Irish National Theatre that was Not.’ In A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage, ed. Stephen Watt, Eileen Morgan and Shakir Mustafa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. 3-17.
• ‘The Myths of Irish Drama.’ Review essay. Irish Literary Supplement (Fall 2000).
• ‘Samuel Beckett and the Counter-Tradition.’ In The Cambridge Guide to Modern Irish Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
• The Life of the Neighborhood Playhouse on Grand Street , an institutional history of the theater in lower Manhattan from 1915-1927, will appear from Syracuse University Press in 2007.
• A collection of essays from the third annual Irish Theatrical Diaspora conference, to be called "Irish Theater in America," is in preparation.

Related Activities

Ex-President of the American Conference for Irish Studies, the largest and increasingly international scholarly organization devoted to interdisciplinary study of Ireland. ACIS is itself a dimension of diaspora phenomena.