CORE COMMITTEE

DR. LUCY WEIR

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, and she is developing a new research project exploring masculinity and violence in postwar performance.

Lucy obtained her PhD in History of Art and Theatre Studies from the University of Glasgow in 2013. Since then, she has lectured on art and performance at various institutions, including the University of Edinburgh and Glasgow School of Art. In 2015, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (University of Edinburgh), before taking up her current post. She and Roberto Filippello co-convene SEXES, a cross-ECA research cluster involving early-career researchers and senior faculty in the fields of gender and sexualities.

Lucy maintains a strong interest in movement practice alongside her academic research. She is a Visiting Lecturer in Dance at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

ERICA O'NEILL

Erica O’Neill is a PhD student of Art History at the University of Glasgow.
Erica’s research: ‘Tristan Tzara: Avant-Garde Performance and Exhibition Practice and the Emergence of the Performance/Theatre Dialectic’ investigates Tzara’s distinct approach to theatre, and how he envisaged the relationship between theatre, performance and visual art.

Erica's study will identify the implication for subsequent theatre and performance practice, and their demarcation as separate categories, of Tzara’s innovations. In February 2017, Erica delivered workshops on Dada and co-directed a performance at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, to promote engagement with Tzara’s work. Erica is organising a Tristan Tzara Retrospective to coincide with the centenary of Paris Dada, 2020.

ALEXANDRA CHIRIAC

Alexandra Chiriac is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of St Andrews on the interchanges between modernist movements in Eastern and Western Europe, with a focus on stage and interior design. She has published on Russian and Romanian design and performance history, as well as editing exhibition catalogues and acting as peer reviewer. Her most recent publication examines avant-garde Yiddish theatre in Bucharest and has been published in the Journal of Jewish History in Romania.

Alexandra holds an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art and has previously worked for Sotheby’s and for GRAD, a non-profit cultural platform for Russian and Eastern European arts based in London. One of the exhibitions she co-curated there in 2014, ‘Work and Play behind the Iron Curtain’ was selected as one of the Guardian’s top 10 design exhibitions of the year.

LUCY BYFORD

Lucy Byford is in her second year of postgraduate research at the University of Edinburgh. Her PhD is funded by the AHRC and uses unpublished archival material to re-assess the relationship between the print culture and performance of Berlin Dada’s members and their earlier satirical precedents in Germany, in particular political cabaret and Witzblätter (humour magazines). In July and August of 2019 she completed a fellowship funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) where she was based at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich.

Lucy received a First Class BA in the History of Art from Oxford University in 2016 and her MA in German Art, Architecture and Design (1900-1930) from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2017, graded distinction. A founding member of artist collective, the Montage Mädels, she also holds a foundation diploma in Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School (2013). Before commencing her doctoral studies, Lucy was an external marker for the Technische Universität München, and worked remotely for the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, conducting archival provenance research in the archives of the imperial collection in Berlin.