Professor Wilson, joined Loughborough in September 2014 as Professor of Drama and, after a period as Associate Dean for Research and Dean in the School of the Arts, English and Drama, he is now also Head of Creative Arts in the School of Design and Creative Arts. He was previously Dean of Research and the Graduate School and Professor of Drama at Falmouth University and Head of Research at the Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries, University of Glamorgan, where he also ran two research centres. He gained his PhD from the University of Exeter in 1997 for a study of the performance of oral narrative traditions amongst teenagers in Britain and Ireland.

He was a member of the Programme Advisory Boards for the RCUK’s programme on the Digital Economy (led by EPSRC) and the AHRC’s programmes on Digital Transformations and Connected Communities. He is also a member of the AHRC Strategic Reviewers Group, the GCRF Peer Review College and Chair of the British Council’s Arts and Humanities Panel for the Researcher Links and Institutional Links Programmes (Newton Fund). 

Professor Wilson’s main research interests lie in the field of popular and vernacular performance and he has published extensively on Storytelling (and its social and policy applications), Grand-Guignol and Brecht and his collaborators. In particular, his work on storytelling has led him to work on the interface between storytelling and digital technology and the way in which the internet has enabled the telling and sharing of ‘extraordinary’ stories of the everyday experiences of people.