Tom Maguire

Tom Maguire, Professor of Contemporary Drama and Performance, is the Head of the School of Arts & Humanities. His research engages with the relationships between performance, identity, place and power particularly in Britain and Ireland. He has published widely in the fields of Irish theatre and Scottish theatre, as well as in the areas of Theatre for Young Audiences and Storytelling Performance. He has also undertaken a number of heritage research projects, including the collection Heritage after Conflict: Northern Ireland, co-edited with Professor Elizabth Crooke in 2018.

From 2021-24, he served as Chair of the Board of the International Theatre for Young Audiences Research Network (ITYARN), one of the constituent networks of ASSITEJ, the international association for theatre for young audiences. He is a co-founder of the Talking TYA research network in Ireland. He is a research advisor to the ASSITEJ project, Building Collective Resilience, funded by Creative Europe, 2021-24.

Tom has been a member of the Arts and Humaities Research Council Peer Review College since 2014, serving as a peer reviewer and member of moderating panels for a number of award schemes. He has been a peer reviewer for a wide range of academic journals and publishers.

Tom was a Co-Investigator for the AHRC-funded Future Screens NI project and for Museums, Crisis and Covid-19, also funded by the AHRC.

A Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Distinguished Teaching Fellow of Ulster University, Tom teaches on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and supervises research students in Drama and in Museums and Cultural Heritages. In 2023, he was appointed as a Visiting Professor to Hubei Normal University, China.