English & Comparative Literary Studies News
Co-Creating Culture: Community, Representation, and History at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry
The University of Warwick, in collaboration with the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, invites applications for a fully funded 3.5-year PhD studentship to explore co-creation in civic theatre. The project investigates how co-creation, as an emergent method and process, seeks to build reciprocal partnerships between arts workers and local communities for the purpose of promoting social justice and challenging notions of who has knowledge, expertise, and the right to be seen and heard in cultural organisations.
The Belgrade has placed co-creation at the heart of its role as a civic theatre, with an ambitious aim to "make the local community part of every show at the Belgrade." Spotlighting four productions—Big Aunty (2023), I, Daniel Blake (2023), Romeo and Juliet (2025), and Nanny of the Maroons (2027)—the project will discover how this commitment to co-creation shapes the values that drive the theatre's culture. It will particularly address Nanny of the Maroons, a retelling of Jamaican revolutionary leader Queen Nanny's history involving over 1,000 community participants drawn from the West Midlands Black Creative Network, Coventry Caribbean Centre, and other local groups. Employing mixed methodologies such as participant observation, interviews, and surveys, the project will ask: What does co-creation mean for artists, participants, audiences, and locals? How can co-creation offer alternatives to models in which creative professionals exclude or exploit the local communities in which civic theatres are embedded? What challenges and learnings arise from co-creation, and how might the Belgrade's experience inform wider arts policy and practice?
The student will be supervised by Dr Matthew Franks (English and Comparative Literary Studies) and Professor Nadine Holdsworth (Theatre and Performance Studies), and benefit from integrated support within Warwick's arts and humanities research environment and the Belgrade's professional networks, including Creative Director Corey Campbell and other staff members. The student will be able to determine whether to receive their doctorate from the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies or the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies.
Congratulations to Raad Khair Allah
Congratulations to Raad Khair Allah who has received an IASH Postdoctoral Digital Humanities Fellowship from the University of Edinburgh!