Rate My Professor Mike Wilson

Professor Mike Wilson is Professor of Drama in the School of Design and Creative Arts at Loughborough University, where he also serves as Head of Creative Arts and Director of the Storytelling Academy. He earned his PhD from the University of Exeter in 1997 for a study on the performance of oral narrative traditions amongst teenagers in Britain and Ireland. His academic career began full-time in 1998 at the University of Glamorgan as Professor of Drama and Head of Research in the Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries, where he established the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling, the first university research centre dedicated to storytelling. From 2010 to 2014, he was Dean of Research and the Graduate School, as well as Dean of the School of Media and Performance and Professor of Drama at Falmouth University. Joining Loughborough in September 2014, he founded the Storytelling Academy, which has led more than 30 externally funded interdisciplinary research projects applying storytelling to social challenges. In June 2025, he was appointed UNESCO’s first Chair in Storytelling Education for Sustainability, focusing on education, environment, and health.

Wilson’s research interests centre on popular and vernacular performance, storytelling and its social and policy applications, Grand-Guignol theatre, Bertolt Brecht and collaborators, and the interface between storytelling and digital technology, including internet-enabled sharing of everyday experiences. As principal investigator, he has directed projects such as ASPECT (using storytelling to reframe climate change debates with DECC), Taking the Field (oral histories of cricket communities with MCC), DRY (drought risk and you, £4.3m NERC-funded), Loneliness in the Digital Age, EMoTICON Network on empathy and trust online, and Branching Out (£2.3m UKRI-funded evaluation of urban treescapes’ social values). He was elected External Fellow of the Institute of Mental Health, University of Nottingham in 2013. Wilson’s key publications include Storytelling (Emerald, 2022), Storytelling Research Methods (Routledge, 2026, with A. Liguori and E. Underwood-Lee), Performing Grand-Guignol: Playing the Theatre of Horror (University of Exeter Press, 2016, with R.J. Hand), London’s Grand-Guignol and the Theatre of Horror (University of Exeter Press, 2007, with R.J. Hand), and Storytelling and Theatre: Contemporary Professional Storytellers and Their Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). His advisory roles encompass RCUK Digital Economy Programme, AHRC Digital Transformations and Connected Communities, and British Council’s Arts and Humanities Panel, influencing public policy in health, environment, and community engagement.