The School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures (SCAPVC) invites you all to the 3^rd Annual SCAPVC lecture. This year we are delighted to welcome IAS Visting Fellows, Dr Geetanjali Shree and Dr Anuradha Kapur who will deliver the lecture on Wednesday, March 13 at 5 pm. 

Location: Lecture hall, 0.08, Faculty of Arts Building (FAB)

In Collaboration: Creative Collisions

The lecture looks to open up the processes of collaborative performance-making that Geetanjali Shree, writer, and Anuradha Kapur, theatre maker have engaged in over the years and which have yielded several theatre/ performance texts. It also seeks to frame these processes within feminist practices of theatre-making, particularly dramaturgy, that began to take shape in the 1980s in India. Geetanjali Shree and Anuradha Kapur will converse with each other to parse and share their dramaturgical vocabularies.

Geetanjali Shree is the winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize, and of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, for her novel, Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi in the Hindi original). She has written five novels - Tomb of Sand, Mai (Mai: Silently Mother), Hamara Shahar Us Baras, Tirohit (The Roof Beneath Their Feet), and Khali Jagah (Empty Space), and five collections of short stories. Besides English, her work has been translated into many languages. Geetanjali has also worked on theatre scripts in collaboration with a Delhi based group, Vivadi, of which she is a founding member. She is frequently invited for residencies, fellowships, lectures, seminars, and workshops across the world.

Anuradha Kapur is a theatre-maker and teacher. Her theatre work has travelled nationally and internationally, and she has taught in Universities in India and abroad. She is the founder member of Vivadi a cross-discipline working group of theatre-makers, visual artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers. Almost all her works have been cross-discipline collaborations. Her writings on performance have been widely anthologized and her book Actors Pilgrims Kings and Gods: The Ramlila at Ramnagar was published by Seagull Books, Calcutta (1993, 2004). Anuradha Kapur was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for Direction in 2004. Anuradha Kapur completed her term as Director National School of Drama, New Delhi in 2013. She was Visiting Professor at Ambedkar University, Delhi for several years.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception

It is with a very heavy heart that we write to let you know that Professor Jim Davis passed away on Saturday 4th November following a stroke. Everyone who had the pleasure of encountering Jim will appreciate that this is a huge loss for his family, friends, colleagues, collaborators and the wider research community. He was a fantastic scholar and unwavering champion for the discipline and theatre historiography. He was such an important part of the Theatre and Performance family at the University of Warwick and will be missed for his leadership, mentorship, friendship and unfailing sense of fun and mischief. Jim Davis joined Warwick in 2004 as Head of Department (2004-2009) after eighteen years teaching Theatre Studies at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where he was latterly Head of the School of Theatre, Film and Dance. In Australia he was also President of the Australasian Drama Studies Association and member of the Board of Studies of the National Institute of Dramatic Art. Prior to leaving for Australia he spent ten years teaching in London at what is now Roehampton University. He co-organised many conferences including for the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR) in New South Wales and at Warwick. He convened Historiography Working Groups for both IFTR and for TaPRA. He served as an editor for the journal Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film. He published widely and with considerable critical acclaim in the area of nineteenth-century British theatre. His most recent bookComic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England (2015) won the TaPRA David Bradby Prize for Research in International Theatre and Performance in 2017 and was shortlisted for the 2015 TLA George Freedley Memorial Award. His other publications include Theatre & Entertainment (2016), Dickensian Dramas: Plays from Charles Dickens Volume II (2017) and European Theatre Performance Practice Vol 3 1750-1900 (editor, 2014). He was also joint author of a study of London theatre audiences in the nineteenth century Reflecting the Audience: London 1840-1880 (2001), which was awarded the 2001 Theatre Book Prize. He contributed numerous chapters including essays on nineteenth-century acting to the Cambridge History of British Theatre and on audiences to the Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre. He also published many articles in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Theatre Notebook, Essays in Theatre, Themes in Drama, New Theatre Quarterly, Nineteenth Century Theatre, Theatre Research International and The Dickensian. He was also responsible for many of the theatrical entries in The Oxford Readers' Companion to Dickens and contributed to the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Theatre and Performance, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Stage Actors and Acting and the New Dictionary of National Biography. For several years he wrote an annual review of publications on nineteenth-century English Drama and Theatre for The Year's Work in English Studies. There will be an event to celebrate Jim’s life in the New Year – we will post details when we know more

"Dirty Queers", Dr. Bryony White's new book and her first non-fiction title, has been acquired by Serpent's Tail Press. A queer cultural history, the book has been described as "fabulously erudite", and is set to be published in Spring 2026.