Samuel Beckett and Europe: History, Culture, Tradition

Niamh M. Bowe is a final-year AHRC-funded PhD student at the University of Reading, UK. Her current research project focusses on the problem of empathy in Beckett’s later dramatic works, with wider research interests including Irish studies, performance studies and history of sympathy in European literature. Recently, she has taught British contemporary theatre at the University of Reading, as well as working on theatre productions in Britain and Ireland.

William Davies is a doctoral researcher and sessional lecturer at the University of Reading, UK. His current project examines the impacts and traces of the Second World War in Samuel Beckett’s work. He co-organised the “Beckett and Europe” (2015) and the “Beckett and Politics” (2016) conferences at the University of Reading. He has written for the Beckett Circle and his forthcoming publications include a chapter on Samuel Beckett and T. S. Eliot in the essay volume Beckett and Modernism (2017) and an essay in the Journal of Beckett Studies on the textual and contextual details of Beckett’s The Capital of the Ruins. In 2017, he was awarded the University of Reading’s Heritage and Creativity Researcher of the Year prize.