For a full list of theatre and performance-related publications, collaborations and projects, please click on individual names. Note this list is being updated regularly. If you are a member of staff or affiliate of King’s and would like to include further information about your work here, please contact the site administrator at performance@kcl.ac.uk.
Rosa Andújar is Deputy Director and Lecturer in Liberal Arts at King’s College London. She has co-edited two volumes which address her research expertise in both ancient Greek tragedy and its modern reception: Paths of Song: The Lyric Dimension of Greek Tragedy (2018) and Greeks and Romans on the Latin American Stage (2020).
Sarah Atkinson is Head of Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries, King’s College London and co-editor of Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies.
Negar Behzadi is a French/Iranian feminist geographer of environment and development, trained in France and the UK. Her work investigated how gender, Muslimness and tradition were reconfigured in the wake of broader politico-ecological transformations and their local impacts through work and resource struggles.
Catherine Boyle is Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies, and Director of the Centre for Language Acts and Worldmaking. Her research interests include Spanish and Latin American drama; cultural history; translation for stage and performance; translation of Shakespeare Spanish; and Spanish American Women’s writing
Tom Brown is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies. He is particularly interested in cinematic narration (agency, rhetoric, self-consciousness etc.) and the theorisation and historicisation of film spectacle (especially in the genres of the musical and the historical film).
David Bullen is an Artistic Director, and Executive Producer of the King’s College London Greek Play. He holds a BA in Drama and Creative Writing, Royal Holloway, University of London; an MA in Research (Drama & Theatre), Royal Holloway, University of London. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Drama and Theatre Studies, Royal Holloway.
Katherine Butler Schofield is Senior Lecturer in South Asian Music and History. Working largely with Persian, Urdu, and visual sources for elite musical culture in North India and the Deccan c.1570–1860, Katherine’s general research interests lie in South Asian music; the history of Mughal India (1526–1858); Islam and Sufism; empire and the paracolonial; and the intersecting histories of the emotions, the senses, aesthetics, ethics, and the supernatural.
Michael Collins is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century American Literature and Culture, Department of English. Most recently, Michael has been working on a cultural history of intelligence testing in the U.S. “Progressive Era” as part of an AHRC Early Career project entitled, “Literary Culture, Meritocracy and the Assessment of Intelligence, 1880- 1920”. He uses ritual and performance theory in the context of U.S. intellectual history, science, and literature to consider how texts “perform” and interact within a social world shaped by gesture and patterns of symbolic interaction along axes of race and class.
Hannah Crawforth is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature in the English Department at King’s College London. Her first monograph, Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature, was published by Cambridge in 2013. She has also co-authored Shakespeare in London, published by Arden (Bloomsbury), based on a course taught at King’s.
Laura Douglas was previously with the Arts and Humanities Research Institute, and is now based in the King’s Cultural Institute.
Graeme Earl is Professor of Digital Humanities and Vice Dean of External Relations, King’s College London. He is a Co-Director of the Portus Project, and is interested in the ways in which cultural heritage and digital technologies collide.
Sarah Fine is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, King’s Collge London. She specialises in political philosophy. Her research to date has focused on the ethics of migration, and particularly the question of whether states have a moral right to exclude non-citizens. Sarah co-edited (with Lea Ypi) Migration in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Membership (Oxford University Press, 2016). In recent years, she has been thinking about methodology in political philosophy, and about work at the intersection of philosophy and the arts.
Joseph Fort is College Organist & Director of the Chapel Choir, and Lecturer in Music, King’s College London. He is active as a musicologist and conductor. His research focuses on eighteenth-century music, with particular interests in: dance-music relationships; the music of Haydn; arrangements and adaptations; performance issues; and phenomenological approaches to musical analysis.
Kélina Gotman is Reader in Theatre and Performance Studies in the English Department at King’s, and author of Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (Oxford Studies in Dance Theory, Oxford University Press, 2018, winner of the David Bradby Award for outstanding research in international theatre and performance, Theatre and Performance Research Association) and Essays on Theatre and Change: Towards a Poetics Of (Routledge, 2018), as well as co-editor of Foucault’s Theatres (Manchester University Press, 2019).
Alex Hutton is a Research Fellow in the Department of History, King’s College London.
Jonathan Kirn is a student of Dramaturgy at Goethe University Frankfurt on research exchange at King’s College London. Central to his work is an understanding of dramaturgy as the reflection on theatre and performance both on an artistic level and regarding the social, legal and economic structures co-constituting it. At KCL he is researching on the aesthetics of ecology – both in the sense of sustainability and in that of asking for modes of living with and within the more-than-human world – and its relation to neoliberal ideas of productivity. He furthermore works as a dramaturge and production manager.
John Lavagnino is Reader in Digital Humanities, King’s College London, working in early modern literature. His current work focuses on early modern drama from 1580 to 1642, and in particular its reception since the closing of the theatres in 1642.
Sarah Lewis is Lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern English Literature, King’s College London. Her research focuses on temporality and early modern performance, and her monograph, Time and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (CUP, 2020), analyses the cultural and theatrical intersections of early modern temporal concepts and gendered identities on the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century stage. She is a co-director of the research network, Grasping Kairos.
Jo Malt is Reader in French Literature & Visual Culture. Her research interests are in 20th- and 21st-century literature, visual art and theory. She is the author of a book on surrealism and politics and is currently writing another book on casts, imprints and traces in modern and contemporary art.
Sonia Massai is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London. She has published widely on the history of the transmission of Shakespeare on the stage and on the page. Her publications include her books on Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance (Cambridge University Press: forthcoming iin 2020) and Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Jemima Matthews is Teaching Fellow in Early Modern English Literature, King’s College London. Jemima’s interdisciplinary research combines archival work with an approach shaped by disciplines such as cultural geography. She continues to be interested in the material culture surrounding writing and performance in early modern London, and her work contributes to the emerging field of water studies.
Justine McConnell is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature (also affiliated with Classics), King’s College London. Her research focuses on the reception of Graeco-Roman epic and drama in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well as on African diaspora literature and performance more widely. She is author of Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (OUP, 2013) and, with Fiona Macintosh, Performing Epic or Telling Tales (OUP, forthcoming 2020).
Gordon McMullan is Professor of English and Director of the London Shakespeare Centre at King’s College London. He is a general textual editor of The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition, and a general editor of Arden Early Modern Drama. He established the long-running MA Shakespeare Studies, offered jointly with Shakespeare’s Globe, in 2000. Between 2011 and 2016 he created and directed Shakespeare400, a consortium of London cultural organisations celebrating the Shakespeare Quatercentenary.
Gemma Miller obtained her PhD at King’s and has been working as a lecturer in early modern literature and culture at various institutions, including King’s College London, Shakespeare’s Globe, Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London online, Ithaca College London Centre and Tufts in London.
Craig Moyes est directeur du Centre for Quebec and French-Canadian Studies dans la School of Advanced Study à l’université de Londres. Il est également professeur à King’s College London où il enseigne les littératures française et québécoise. En 2012, il a publié Furetière’s Roman bourgeois and the Problem of Exchange: Titular Economies chez Legenda (Oxford).
Lucy Munro is Professor/Reader of Early Modern English Literature (Drama), King’s College London. The thread that runs through Dr Munro’s research is an interest in the dynamic relationship between old and new in literary cultures and their afterlives. She has published two books to date, and worked extensively with theatre organisations such as Shakespeare’s Globe and the New Victoria Theatre, Newcastle-Under-Lyme.
Ros Murray is Lecturer in French, King’s College London. Ros held research posts at the University of Manchester and Queen Mary University of London, where she taught in French and film, before coming to King’s as a lecturer in 2016. Ros is a founding member, with Dr. Azadeh Fatehrad (Kingston), of the research network Herstoriographies www.herstoriographies.co.uk.
Jayne Elizabeth Peake is Engagement Manager, The Exchange, Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy, King’s College London. Her research subject areas include arts, culture and media, policy and society, and exhibition. She has been working on research-based exhibitions and performance as part of the Arts & Conflict hub and across SSPP since 2016.
Sanja Perovic is Reader in 18th-C French Studies, French Department. Her background is in Comparative Literature and since coming to King’s she has taught all aspects of the French curriculum. Her first book, The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics (2012), considered the unique status of the French revolutionary calendar in the revolutionary experience of ‘making new time’, giving rise to a collaboration with the British multi-media performance artist Stuart Brisley and the fiction-writer Tony White (2013-2014).
Alan Read is Professor of Theatre in the Department of English. Alan is the author of Theatre & Law (2015), Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement: The Last Human Venue (2008), Architecturally Speaking : Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday (2000), and Theatre & Everyday Life : An ethics of performance (1993). Alan is a member the Performance Research Group at King’s, and is currently developing the work of the Performance Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Read_(writer)
Paul Readman is Professor of Modern British History at King’s College London. Readman is Director of the major Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded project, ‘The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain, 1905-2016’. This project has published articles and essays on pageants, and a multi-million-word database with details of over 650 pageants.
Anna Reading is Professor of Culture and Creative Industries, and Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Institute (AHRI), King’s College London. Anna Reading has played a leading role in developing the field of Media Memory Studies. She is the author and editor of six books, including Gender and Memory in the Globital Age; The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Memory and Culture and Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggles. She is also a critically playwright.
Mariví Rodríguez-Quiñones is a Tutor in Spanish, King’s College London. She combined language teaching with her interest in theatre studies and theatre production, in the development of a highly innovative and creative extra-curriculum programme: SPLAS PLAY. She is also the founder and director of the Spanish Theatre Festival of London, FesTeLón which aims to develop cultural and linguistic bridges between artistic communities in the UK and Spain through theatre and the arts.
Sarah Salih is Senior Lecturer in Medieval English and Co-Director of the Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, at King’s College London. She is a specialist in Middle English literature, with an interest in medieval drama and performance in historical context and in the contemporary world.
Ben Schofield is Reader in German Studies and Director of the Centre for Modern Literature and Culture, King’s College London. Ben’s research focusses on German Studies, Transnational Studies, and Comparative Cultural Studies across the 19th, 20th and 21st Centuries. He is the editor of Transnational German Studies (with Rebecca Braun), and German in the World (with James Hodkinson) and is the author of Private Lives and Collective Destinies: Class, Nation and the Folk in Gustav Freytag (2012), and The Tradition of the Bestseller (2012, with Charlotte Woodford).
Lara Shalson is Senior Lecturer in Theatre & Performance Studies, King’s College London. She is the author of Theatre & Protest (2017), a member of the Performance Research Group at King’s, and a member of the board of Performance Studies international (PSi), for which she is co-chair of the Emerging Scholars Committee.
Gonda Van Steen is Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature. She is also Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies. Her research and teaching interests include Greek language and literature through Byzantine and Modern Greek, Western travelers to Greece and the Ottoman Empire, nineteenth and twentieth-century receptions of the classics and especially of ancient theatre, and modern Greek intellectual and social history.
Sophie Stevens is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Language Acts and Worldmaking in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies; she is a researcher, theatre translator and practitioner. Sophie completed her PhD on Uruguayan theatre in translation at King’s College London and this forms the basis of her forthcoming book, Uruguayan Theatre in Translation: Theory and Practice, published by Legenda.
Lizzie Stewart is Lecturer in Modern Languages, Culture and Society; Cross-appointed to the Departments of German, French and SPLAS. She is author of ‘Staging New German Realities: Turkish-German Scripts of Postmigration’ (forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan), bringing a theatre and performance studies perspective into the scholarly discourse on Turkish-German culture and the after-effects of labour migration.
David Treece is Camoens Professor of Portuguese, King’s College London, with research interests in Brazilian Culture and Literature; Brazilian popular music; Afro-Brazilian culture and politics; anti-racism in Brazil; Translation from Portuguese, including song translation. Treece is currently developing work on “Music and anti-racism in contemporary Brazil” with the support of a three-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.
Daniele Vecchiato is Assistant Professor of German and Translation Studies at the University of Padua, Italy. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the Humboldt University of Berlin (2014-17), and a Marie Curie Research Fellow at King’s College London (2018-19). Daniele has worked extensively on German theatre culture of both the 18th century (Schiller, Goethe, Kleist), and the 20th and 21st centuries (Peter Weiss, Urs Widmer, Falk Richter, Rimini Protokoll, among others). He is currently working on political theatre and performance activism in contemporary Germany, as well as on the “visual and performative turn” in Law and Literature studies.
Ricarda Vidal holds a PhD in Cultural Studies (London Consortium/ Birkbeck). Currently she is pursuing a practice-based research project into the wondrous world of translation within the fine arts and poetry. Besides public workshops and exhibitions, the project includes the publication of journal articles and books, such as Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders: Intersemiotic Journeys between Media (co-edited with Madeleine Campbell, Palgrave 2019) and Home on the Move: two Poems go on a Journey (co-edited with Manuela Perteghella, Parthian 2019, forthcoming).
Luca Viganò is Professor of Computer Science in the Faculty of Natural & Mathematical Sciences, King’s College London. He is also Vice Dean for External Relations and Head of the Cybersecurity Group. ‘Computer scientist by day, playwright by night,’ Professor Viganò is an established theatre writer in Italy, and uses plays, movies, novels, popular culture and artworks in his modules on cryptography and security.
Doctoral and Postdoctoral Affiliates
Debanjali Biswas is a doctoral scholar in performance studies and cultural anthropology at India Institute, King’s College London. Her thesis ‘Performance and Violence in Everyday Life in Manipur’ is an ethnography on Meitei performative traditions, lineage of violence in contemporary Manipur which she completed on the Commonwealth Scholarship.
Rowena Hawkins is a LAHP-funded PhD candidate in the English department at King’s College London. Her thesis – ‘Festival Shakespeares: Networking Performance across Europe’ – focuses on the ways in which European International Shakespeare Festivals make communities and remake Shakespeare, paying particular attention to audiences and adaptation.
Sheridan Humphreys is a creative writer and researcher. Her work includes screenplays and plays, and I am working on my first novel. She is also a PhD Scholar at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College London where she is writing a feature screenplay inspired by the forgotten, hidden histories of Indigenous Australians who lived in England in the 1830s. She is working as Lecturer in Screenwriting at University of Greenwich and also at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research explores hidden histories of ethnicity in the British Empire, travellers in history whose paths may have crossed. Her work further explores what screenwriters can do to address the almost complete lack of protagonists of colour in period drama specifically, and how we can create more leading roles for actors of colour in this genre.
Christian Keller is a PhD student at King’s College London and Humboldt University Berlin. His thesis ‘Natura ex machina’ analyses virtual reality technologies in art installations which break with the nature-culture binary by implementing a performativity of materiality from which nature escapes as their ground of practice. He is also editor of Austrian theatre magazine gift – Magazin für freies Theater; he works for the Austrian Association of Independent Performing Arts and as a freelance translator.
Beth Potter‘s doctoral project explores how circuses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shaped national identity and attitudes to empire in the United Kingdom. She also has keen interests in other forms of popular literature in performance, particularly music hall and early film, as well as the theory of cultural institutions and politics of the archive.
Jonathan Powell is a PhD candidate in the English department at King’s College London, examining localised engagements with early-seventeenth-century common law by theatre practitioners across Jacobean Britain. To do so, his work employs a jurisdictional framework for linguistic and spatial analysis, interested in institutional idiosyncrasies shaping the production of dramatic text, and in varying and variant sites and spaces for (and of) legal and literary performance. His likes include old plea-rolls, travelling players, legal barragoüin, and performance contracts. His work has been supported by both the Royal Historical Society and the AHRI. Jonathan also maintains a long-standing collaborative partnership with contemporary artist Martin Groß, having conducted translation and sound installation work for exhibitions at the Royal Academy, and in Leipzig, Rostock and Berlin.
Zoë Quick’s architectural practice, research and teaching engage performance and interdisciplinary collaboration to enact relationships between archives, communities and ecologies. Her practice-led PhD research at the The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, and the English Department at KCL (supervised by Kélina Gotman), re-performs the old Welsh custom gwlana (wool-gathering), as a critical spatial practice that moves between poles of ‘farming’ and ‘re-wilding’ within fields of current debate over the Welsh uplands. This polypraxic re-search between archives of institution and mountain involves walking, talking, spinning, weaving, sharing stories and singing ballads.
Anna Rindfleisch is a PhD candidate in English Research at King’s College London, UK. Her research interests focus on interwar period scripts of mourning, veteran studies, performing gendered acts of remembrance and commemoration, and the transmission of war trauma into the performing arts. She has published on the performative qualities of veteran remembrance, female-conducted mourning rites, and alternative scripts of mourning.
Corrie Tan 陳霖靈 (she/her) is a practitioner-researcher and President’s Graduate Fellow on the joint doctoral programme between King’s College London and the National University of Singapore. Her thesis “The Intimate Critic: the labours, relationships and pedagogies of performance criticism in Southeast Asia” seeks to theorise critique from the context of Southeast Asia through ethnographic and practice-based research in the cities of Singapore, Yogyakarta and Manila. She is committed to radical shifts in performance criticism – redefining the critic as dramaturg, collaborator, archivist, facilitator and shapeshifter – with an embodied critical practice centered around care, intimacy and generosity. She is resident critic and contributing editor with the Southeast Asian arts platform Arts Equator, where she has run mentorship programmes and co-convened a critics’ reading group, and has also written regularly about performance for The Guardian, Exeunt Magazine and The Straits Times. Corrie holds an MA (Dist) in Performance & Culture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Goldsmiths, University of London, which was fully funded by the National Arts Council (Postgraduate) Arts Scholarship and the Goldsmiths International Scholarship, and received her BA (Hons) in Literary Arts from Brown University on a Singapore Press Holdings Journalism Scholarship. www.corrie-tan.com
Savannah Whaley is a LAHP-funded PhD candidate in the English department at King’s College London. In her research, she looks at live art from 1970 to the present to think through forms of relation under neoliberal capitalism. She is interested in performance that enacts moments of ‘feminist irritant’ relationality, exposing connections and antagonisms between feminist body art practices and liberal feminist logics in the global north, and constituting modes of resistance to gendered and racialized processes of individuation. Between April and July 2019, Savannah was an International Research Fellow at the Smithsonian Institute’s Archives of American Art in Washington, DC. She begins a Study Room Residency at the Live Art Development Agency later this year.