Fintan Walsh is Professor of Performing Arts and Humanities and Director of Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. His recent books include the collection Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance (Methuen Drama 2020) and the monograph Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland (2016). Fintan is a former editor of the Theatre Research International, and editor of the book series Contemporary Performance Texts.

Tender and rigorous, this book invites readers to linger with difficult pasts and consider how best to grasp their hauntings, demands and manifestations in the present. In moving with, and through, the rip currents of death, love and queer inheritances, Walsh asks us to reimagine how and why we endure all that was and is yet to come. This is a book about mourning as well as holding, a simultaneous act of exhumation and a laying to rest.

• List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Performing Queer Possession 1. Channelling Ghosts: the Haunted Present 2. Muscle Memories: Exe(o)rcising History3. Re-enacting Violence: Sharing Responsibility 4. Arresting Objects: Transforming Matters 5. Wilde Spirits: Occupation and Commemoration6. Grief’s Ricochet: Intermedial Returns7. Epilogue: Shorelines of the DispossessedNotesReferences Index

Fintan Walsh is Professor of Performing Arts and Humanities and Director of Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. His recent books include the collection Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance (Methuen Drama 2020) and the monograph Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland (2016). Fintan is a former editor of the Theatre Research International, and editor of the book series Contemporary Performance Texts.

Tender and rigorous, this book invites readers to linger with difficult pasts and consider how best to grasp their hauntings, demands and manifestations in the present. In moving with, and through, the rip currents of death, love and queer inheritances, Walsh asks us to reimagine how and why we endure all that was and is yet to come. This is a book about mourning as well as holding, a simultaneous act of exhumation and a laying to rest.

• List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Performing Queer Possession 1. Channelling Ghosts: the Haunted Present 2. Muscle Memories: Exe(o)rcising History3. Re-enacting Violence: Sharing Responsibility 4. Arresting Objects: Transforming Matters 5. Wilde Spirits: Occupation and Commemoration6. Grief’s Ricochet: Intermedial Returns7. Epilogue: Shorelines of the DispossessedNotesReferences Index