Rate My Professor Ryan Hartigan

Ryan Hartigan is a Senior Teaching Fellow in Theatre Studies and Postgraduate Coordinator in the School of Performing Arts at the University of Otago, within the Humanities Division. From Aotearoa New Zealand, he returned home after 12 years based in the United States, where he served as Associate Professor of Theater at Cornish College of the Arts, faculty member in Theatre at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and PhD candidate in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. At Brown, his doctoral work was supervised by Patricia Ybarra, with committee members Megan Lewis, Paja Faudree, and Adrienne Keene. Hartigan's extensive performance background includes Artist-in-Residence positions with the Contemporary Theater Company in Rhode Island, co-founding improvisation companies such as WilburWilburNealbur (selected for multiple international festivals), and establishing the Rhode Island Interscholastic Improv League as an ITI licensee in Theatresports. He also developed improv programs at Middlebridge School and was an International All-Star at the Improvaganza Hawaii Festival. Currently, he co-founded and serves as artistic director of dollhouse, an independent theatre company in Dunedin.

Hartigan's research lies at the intersection of theatre and performance studies with legal studies and practice, probing the performative construction of the rule of law, particularly in Indigenous challenges to sovereignty. His book project, Performing the Time of the Law: Legal Histories, Undead Natives and Anxious Courtrooms, examines juridical performances in cases including Aotearoa New Zealand's Te Urewera Four trials (2007-12), Canada's Delgamuukw v. R, and Australia's Mabo decision and legacies, addressing chronopolitics, ghostly evidence, undead natives, and anxious courtrooms. Additional foci encompass biopolitics, the demonization of mental illness in U.S. mass shootings, performance modernism (Alfred Jarry, pataphysics, self-performance), and cultural enactments like rugby and the haka. Key publications include the chapter "‘This is a trial, not a performance!’ Staging the Time of the Law" in Law and Performance (University of Massachusetts Press, 2018); "Breaking Bureaucracy: Law, performing chronopolitics and the logic of terror in Aotearoa-New Zealand’s Te Urewera 2007 raids" (Performance Research, 2022); "Embarrassing Time, Performing Disunity: Rugby, the haka, and Aotearoa-New Zealand in the United Kingdom" (Performance Research, 2011); "‘They Watch Me as They Watch This’—Alfred Jarry, Symbolism and Self-as-Performance in Fin-de-Siècle Paris" (Australasian Drama Studies, 2008); and "Affective Temporalities: The Haka, Rugby, and Aotearoa—New Zealand in the U.K." (Extensions, 2011). Honors feature awards from TaPRA (UK) and ADSA, UCLA Spotlighted Scholar in Performance Studies (one of three graduate students selected), participant in UCSB's Global Theater and Performance Studies Workshop (2012), and Summer Fellow at Northwestern University's Performance Studies Institute. He coordinates courses such as THEA221 Exploring Worlds Through Theatre and Performance, THEA352 Directing, and THEA451 Advanced Directing.