Active Speech

Úna Kealy lectures in Theatre Studies and English in South East Technological University (SETU). Prior to her career in academia, Úna worked as a drama workshop facilitator and arts manager in Britain and Ireland in both state-funded and commercial theatre organisations. In 2022, she worked with Amanda Coogan, Alvean Jones, Lianne Quigley, Dublin Theatre of the Deaf, Cork Deaf Community Choir, and SETU staff and students on a research project entitled Lyrical Bodies, an investigation of Teresa Deevy’s ballet Possession, which was performed in Project Arts Centre, Dublin and The Granary Theatre, Cork as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival in 2024. With Kate McCarthy, she has co-authored ‘Writing from the Margins: Re-framing Teresa Deevy’s Archive and Her Correspondence with James Cheasty c.1952–1962’, Irish University Review 52.2 (2022); ‘Shape Shifting the Silence: An Analysis of Talk Real Fine, Just like a Lady by Amanda Coogan in collaboration with Dublin Theatre of the Deaf: An Appropriation of Teresa Deevy’s The King of Spain’s Daughter (1935)’, in The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, Vol 1: 1716–1992 (Liverpool University Press, 2021); and ‘Participatory Performances: Spaces of Creative Negotiation’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance (Palgrave, 2018). Other publications include ‘Resisting Power and Direction: The King of Spain’s Daughter by Teresa Deevy as a Feminist Call to Action’, Estudios Irlandeses, 15 (2020) and ‘Stasis, Rootlessness and Violence in Lay Me Down Softly’, in The Art of Billy Roche: Wexford as the World (Peter Lang, 2012). With Richard Hayes, she co-authored ‘Artistic Vision and Regional Resistance: The Gods Are Angry, Miss Kerr and the Red Kettle Theatre Company, a Case Study’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance (Palgrave, 2018).