Eric Weitz

Eric Weitz is an Associate Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at Trinity College Dublin, lecturing in Acting, Comedy, and the Phenomenology of Theatre and Performance; he is also currently serving as Interim Director for the Gaiety School of Acting, The National Theatre School of Ireland.

Most recently he co-edited and contributed to the Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance (2018). Other publications include Theatre & Laughter (2016) and The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy (2009), as well as two edited collections, For the Sake of Sanity: Doing things with humour in Irish society (2014) and The Power of Laughter: Comedy and Contemporary Irish Theatre (2004). He edited the European Journal of Humour Research Special Issue on ‘Humour and Social Media’ (2016) and sits on its Advisory Board, along with that of the Hungarian Journal for English and American Studies (HJEAS). He has written about ‘Online and Internet Humor’ in the Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor (2017); also having contributed to the Encyclopedia of Humor Studies (SAGE), Performance Research, the Irish University Review, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance. 

He is a founding member of the Irish Society for Humor Studies (ISTR) and in May concludes a four-year term as President. He serves on the boards of two socially engaged theatre companies, Smashing Times in Dublin and Collective Encounters in Liverpool, England.