Nicholas Duddy
DPhil Candidate
Balliol College
Thesis: Suicide on the Twentieth-Century Stage
Supervisor: Professor Sos Eltis
Research Interests:
- Modern and contemporary literature
- Theatre and performance
- Dramaturgy and creative writing
- Australian literature
- Existentialism
- Psychoanalysis
- Trauma theory, memory studies, and the medical humanities
My research explores representations of suicide in drama after the Second World War. Drawing on the plays and production histories of Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett, Marsha Norman, Sarah Kane, Alice Birch, and others, I examine how the qualities of dramatic art – its connection with time and memory, its live action and dialogic nature, its actor-audience relationship – offer a unique form for studying the suicidal act. This interdisciplinary study draws on suicidology, existential philosophy, and the medical humanities in its examination of the ethics, etiology, and experience of suicide.
