Simon Bayly

Simon Bayly

Dr

Accepting PhD Students

PhD projects

drama; theatre; performance; socially-engaged art practice and its relationship to place, urbanism and housing; psychoanalysis and performance; philosophies of theatre, performance, collectivity and community; work and labour in contemporary art.

Calculated based on number of publications stored in Pure and citations from Scopus
20012023

Research activity per year

Personal profile

Personal profile

Simon is currently co-leader of the postgraduate research programme at the Guildhall School Music & Drama. 

He works broadly in the fields of live art and performance and is open to supervising MPhil/PhD projects in the following areas: participatory and socially-engaged forms of art practice; performance and live art; art and ecology; the meanings of work and labour within artistic milieux; the material and social architectures of performance and place-making; philosophies of performance; the psychodynamics of groups and organizations; intersections of performance and psychoanalysis. 

He started his professional career as Associate Director responsible for international development at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, directed the London-based live arts company PUR, active between 1992 and 2008 and has a long-standing interest in the psychodynamics of groups, studying for postgraduate qualifications in psychoanalytic approaches to organization at the Tavistock & Portman NHS Trust and the Institute of Group Analysis.

He held the position of Reader in Drama, Theatre and Performance the University of Roehampton, London from 2006-2022, where he taught at BA, MA and PhD levels and co-directed the MA in Performance & Creative Research.

From 2017-2020, he led Acts of Assembly, a project exploring artistic and political forms meeting, gathering and assembling, supported by a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship. With Johanna Linsley, he edited the spring 2024 issue of the journal Performance Research 'On Meeting', which brought together a variety of artistic and academic perspectives on this topic. 

Publications include the book A Pathognomy of Performance (Routledge, 2011), book chapters and essays on the meeting as a social genre, the project as the unit of contemporary work, the anxieties of dramaturgy, the politics of object-oriented ontologies, the value of waste and the forces of vibration.

He is a board member of the UK Cohousing Network, where he works on a range of projects supporting the development of community-led housing in the UK.

External positions

UK Cohousing Network

1 Feb 2020 → …