Savannah Whaley

Dr Savannah Whaley researches and teaches performance studies and critical theory. Her work primarily focuses on questions of gender and labour since 1970. She is particularly interested in experimental theatre and performance forms, and in Marxist, feminist and aesthetic theory. Before coming to St Andrews, she taught at King’s College London and Queen Mary University of London.

Savannah completed an AHRC-funded PhD at KCL in 2022. Her monograph project drawing from this thesis rehistoricises the emergence and development of performance art in the US and UK in relation to changes in labour production since 1965. She is working on a second project that analyses performance and visual artists' responses to changes in bioreproductive technologies and government policies on motherhood and family in the UK and North America, 1970 - 1990. This project aims to explore ideological, discursive, and material connections between ideas of sex and gender, questions of ‘natural’ human capacities, and the reproduction of life and society.