UTAD Conference

Keynote Speech: ‘Dramatic Origins, Dynamic Process’

Prof Innes was an undergraduate at the University of Glasgow in the early eighties, and considers himself to be a child of the theory wars. He wrote his Ph.D at Stirling University on Shakespeare's Sonnets, which was subsequently published by Palgrave Macmillan. His first academic position was at the University of Warsaw. After a few years he returned to Scotland to teach at the Universities of Edinburgh, Strathclyde and Glasgow. In 2015 he became Head of Department in Literary and Critical Studies at the University of Gloucestershire and promoted to Professor of Shakespeare Studies. Early in 2021 he joined the United Arab Emirates University as Professor of English.

His research interests are largely in contemporary theatre and performance. A central concern of his work has been with structures of theatrical persuasion and spectatorship, both within and beyond the professional theatre, which led to the book The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images (Routledge 2014). Formative experiences include performing with the theatre company PUR (directed by Simon Bayly and Lisa Baraitser) in the late 1990s, and encountering the work of Societas Raffaello Sanzio in the early 2000s. With Nicholas Ridout, he collaborated on making a book with the company The Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio (Routledge 2007). He still occasionally makes performance, most recently a series of collaborations with Eirini Kartsaki including How to Catch a Dog in a Bucket.

Ayşegül (Günkut) Yüksel was born in Istanbul on May 8, 1941. She graduated from Üsküdar American Girls’ High School in 1959 and İstanbul University, Department of English Language and Literature in 1964. Yüksel published poetry, articles, and novel translations between 1962-65. She received her Master of Arts degree in 1966 from New York University in the U.S.A where she went to study with a Fulbright scholarship. She married Önder Yüksel in 1969 and moved to Ankara in 1970. Ayşegül Yüksel completed her doctorate in 1981 at the Department of Drama at the Faculty of Languages, History and Geography of Ankara University and worked as a faculty member at Middle East Technical University (METU) between 1970-87. In 1981, she also started teaching at Ankara University’s Department of Drama. She became an associate professor in 1985 and professor in 1992. From 1987 to 2006, she taught at the Department of English Language and Literature in Ankara University and worked as the head of the department from 2003 to 2006. She continued teaching courses at Ankara University after her retirement at the end of 2006. She has also taught part-time at Hacettepe University State Conservatory, Atılım University, and Başkent University.