Dr Kirsty Sedgman

Kirsty is an award-winning cultural studies scholar specialising in audiences, experience, behaviour, and communication.

Her work investigates how people find value in cultural participation. How do they experience and respond to the things they see? How are these pleasures and disappointments made meaningful within their lives? And what can all this tell us about the role of the arts in society, as well as the relationship between cultural institutions, power, identity, and place?

Her 2016 book Locating the Audience (Intellect) was the first to explore how people developed relationships with a new cultural institution at the time of its formation: the then brand-new National Theatre Wales. Her second, The Reasonable Audience (Palgrave 2018), examined behaviour policing in the theatre etiquette campaigns. Her third monograph On Being Unreasonable (Faber & Faber 2023) is out in bookshops now, and explores what it means to 'be reasonable' across every aspect of social life. As a popular media commentator, Kirsty appears regularly on the radio (inc. BBC R4’s Front Row, Women’s Hour, & World at One, R3 Free Thinking, and R4 5Live programmes) as well as on television shows from Channel 4 News to BBC3 Inside Culture to USA Today. Her research has been featured in outlets like the Guardian, Telegraph, Washington Post, and on the front page of the New York Times.