Peter Duffy – författare

At the height of the Irish Famine, now considered the greatest social disaster to strike nineteenth-century Europe, Anglo-Irish landlord Major Denis Mahon was assassinated as he drove his carriage through his property in County Roscommon. Mahon had already removed 3,000 of his 12,000 starving tenants by offering some passage to America aboard disease-ridden "coffin ships," giving others a pound or two to leave peaceably, and sending the sheriff to evict the rest. His murder sparked a sensation and drove many of the world's most powerful leaders, from the queen of England to the pope, to debate its meaning. Now, for the first time, award-winning journalist Peter Duffy tells the story of this assassination and its connection to the cataclysm that would forever change Ireland and America.

Devising Theatre in Times of Crisis: Practices for a Post-Pandemic World explores the intersection of collective applied theatre practice and the promotion of subjective well-being during periods of global crisis.Drawing from the collaborative experiences of eight theatre professors across five continents during the COVID-19 pandemic, this book presents innovative approaches to ethical creative practice through intercultural dialogue and arts-based research. The authors share their experiences from Turkey, Singapore, Taiwan, Uganda, Australia, and the United States, highlighting their use of Shaun Tan's illustrated book The Red Tree as inspiration for collaborative work. This shared frame allowed them and their students to interrogate pandemic experiences while fostering connection and prioritising participant well-being. Shifting the focus away from the finished productions, the book emphasises the creative process itself, demonstrating how it can be transformed to support mental health, encourage intercultural exchange, and model sustainable practice grounded in an ethic of care. This timely resource provides practical strategies alongside a robust pedagogical foundation for creating meaningful work during challenging circumstances, offering valuable lessons for navigating future crises beyond the pandemic through art that nurtures both creators and audiences.This book is essential reading for theatre practitioners, directors, educators, students, and researchers interested in devised performance, applied theatre, and arts-based wellbeing.

Devising Theatre in Times of Crisis: Practices for a Post-Pandemic World explores the intersection of collective applied theatre practice and the promotion of subjective well-being during periods of global crisis.Drawing from the collaborative experiences of eight theatre professors across five continents during the COVID-19 pandemic, this book presents innovative approaches to ethical creative practice through intercultural dialogue and arts-based research. The authors share their experiences from Turkey, Singapore, Taiwan, Uganda, Australia, and the United States, highlighting their use of Shaun Tan's illustrated book The Red Tree as inspiration for collaborative work. This shared frame allowed them and their students to interrogate pandemic experiences while fostering connection and prioritising participant well-being. Shifting the focus away from the finished productions, the book emphasises the creative process itself, demonstrating how it can be transformed to support mental health, encourage intercultural exchange, and model sustainable practice grounded in an ethic of care. This timely resource provides practical strategies alongside a robust pedagogical foundation for creating meaningful work during challenging circumstances, offering valuable lessons for navigating future crises beyond the pandemic through art that nurtures both creators and audiences.This book is essential reading for theatre practitioners, directors, educators, students, and researchers interested in devised performance, applied theatre, and arts-based wellbeing.

The never-before-told tale of the German-American who infiltrated New York’s Nazi underground in the days leading up to World War II: “Thrilling, well-researched, well-told, fascinating” (Minneapolis Star Tribune).He was the first hero of World War II and yet the American public has never seen his face. William G. Sebold, a naturalized American of German birth, risked his life to become the first double agent in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He spent sixteen months in the Nazi underground of New York City, consorting with a colorful cast of spies. Sebold was at the center of the most sophisticated investigation yet devised by the FBI, which established a short-wave radio station on Long Island to communicate with Hamburg spymasters and set up a “research office” in Times Square that allowed agents hidden behind a two-way mirror to film meetings conducted between Sebold and the spy suspects. The result was the arrest and conviction of thirty-three spies, still the largest espionage case in American history. The guilty verdicts were announced in Brooklyn federal court just hours after Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, which meant that the Führer could not call upon a small army of embedded spies and saboteurs during the most trying days of the coming struggle. “As you know,” an FBI official later told J. Edgar Hoover, “Sebold gave us the most outstanding case in Bureau history.” In Double Agent, Peter Duffy tells this full account. Here is a story “rich with eccentric characters, suspense, and details of spycraft in the war’s early days….The result is a compelling cultural history with all the intricacy and intrigue of a good spy novel” (The Boston Globe).

The never-before-told tale of the German-American who infiltrated New York’s Nazi underground in the days leading up to World War II: “Thrilling, well-researched, well-told, fascinating” (Minneapolis Star Tribune).He was the first hero of World War II and yet the American public has never seen his face. William G. Sebold, a naturalized American of German birth, risked his life to become the first double agent in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He spent sixteen months in the Nazi underground of New York City, consorting with a colorful cast of spies. Sebold was at the center of the most sophisticated investigation yet devised by the FBI, which established a short-wave radio station on Long Island to communicate with Hamburg spymasters and set up a “research office” in Times Square that allowed agents hidden behind a two-way mirror to film meetings conducted between Sebold and the spy suspects. The result was the arrest and conviction of thirty-three spies, still the largest espionage case in American history. The guilty verdicts were announced in Brooklyn federal court just hours after Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, which meant that the Führer could not call upon a small army of embedded spies and saboteurs during the most trying days of the coming struggle. “As you know,” an FBI official later told J. Edgar Hoover, “Sebold gave us the most outstanding case in Bureau history.” In Double Agent, Peter Duffy tells this full account. Here is a story “rich with eccentric characters, suspense, and details of spycraft in the war’s early days….The result is a compelling cultural history with all the intricacy and intrigue of a good spy novel” (The Boston Globe).

This collection of essays from many of the world’s preeminent drama education practitioners captures the challenges and struggles of teaching with honesty, humour, openness and integrity. Collectively the authors possess some two hundred years of shared experience in the field, and each essay investigates the mistakes of best-intentions, the lack of awareness, and the omissions that pock all of our careers. The authors ask, and answer quite honestly, a series of difficult and reflexive questions: What obscured our understanding of our students’ needs in a particular moment? What drove our professional expectations?  And how has our practice changed as a result of those experiences? Modelled on reflective practice, this book will be an essential, everyday guide to the challenges of drama education.

At a time when universities demand immediate and quantifiable impacts of scholarship, the voices of research participants become secondary to impact factors and the volume of research produced. Moreover, what counts as research within the academy constrains practices and methods that may more authentically articulate the phenomena being studied. When external forces limit methodological practices, research innovation slows and homogenizes.This book aims to address the methodological, interpretive, ethical/procedural challenges and tensions within theatre-based research with a goal of elevating our field’s research practice and inquiry. Each chapter embraces various methodologies, positionalities and examples of mediation by inviting two or more leading researchers to interrogated each other’s work and, in so doing, highlighted current debates and practices in theatre-based research. Topics include: ethics, method, audience, purpose, mediation, form, aesthetics, voice, data generation, and research participants. Each chapter frames a critical dialogue between researchers that take multiple forms (dialogic interlude, research conversation, dramatic narrative, duologue, poetic exchange, etc.).