David Strong

I am a doctoral researcher at the University of East Anglia where my work is funded by a CHASE AHRC Studentship. 

My work focusses on the interconnection of religion and politics in the 1930s through an investigation of the verse drama produced in and around the Group Theatre of London.
Critically overlooked, the Group Theatre involved prominent modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender who were variously committed to communism and Christianity but nonetheless worked together under the Group Theatre’s community-oriented model of theatre. I am particularly interested in the ways that community is imagined and staged in these works and how choral performance and group movement are used to explore and embody communitarian ideas/ideals.

I have a broad interest in twentieth-century literature and culture with a specialisation in modernism. I also have an interest in theology of the same period, in particular the work of Paul Tillich and the concept of theopoetics, developed in the latter half of the twentieth-century, and the overlaps of this more affective mode of theology with literary modernism.