The Internationalisation of Theatre and Performance Studies (2006-2017)

Written by Prof. Emerita Janelle Reinelt

Changing of the guard

In 2006, Nigel Thrift became Vice-Chancellor of Warwick. He was/is a social geographer with a broad sweep of research interests including performance theory. He was also keen on expanding the scope and prestige of Warwick through wider engagement with international partners and programmes, encouraging interdisciplinary and cutting-edge research and aspiration. In that same year, Jim Davis became Head of Department and hired international talent to help him build the Warwick School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies. He hired new staff from Eastern Europe, North America, South Africa, and Australia to create a richly diverse faculty. He recruited me to be Director of Research and Baz Kershaw as a distinguished senior hire--possible because VC Thrift knew and admired Baz’s work.

A new approach

While theatre history remained a key strength in the department through Jim’s widely known and respected research on 18th-century theatre and visual culture, and Margaret Shewring’s emphasis on Shakespeare and the Early Modern period, the weight of the research became more contemporary with the new hirings. In addition to modules on such topics as Exile, Street Theatre, African Theatre, Documentary Performance, and Eurovision, Contemporary British Drama continued as a strength in staff such as Nadine Holdsworth and Geraldine Cousin, joined by myself. Baz Kershaw led an emphasis on practice as research building on Nicholas Whybrow’s and Tim White’s longstanding dedication to this fairly new concept, enhanced by the addition of Susan Haedicke who also emphasized this area of teaching and learning. As Director of Research, I led our staff into collaborations with international colleagues, which was enabled because I was President of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) from 2003-2007 and because newer staff such as Milija Gluhovic, Yvette Hutchinson, and Silvija Jestrovic were well connected to their home countries and theatre studies traditions.

Internationalism and Interdisciplinarity

Felicitously, one of Nigel Thrift’s first priorities was the establishment of the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS). Jim and I served on the planning committee along with several colleagues who became close associates of the department such as Ann Caesar, at that time Head of Faculty, and Margot Finn who went on to become the first Director of IAS. Its mission was and is ‘to champion interdisciplinary and international research’. We obtained one of the first Newton post-doctoral positions at Warwick in the Arts through association with the new Institute in 2007 for a Japanese colleague, and later IAS funded several visiting scholar awards which led to a ten-year collaboration with Indian colleagues from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi. The interdisciplinary emphasis was taken up with enthusiasm by several members of our department and led to a multi-year collaboration with colleagues in the Politics department, headed by myself and Shirin Rai, resulting in several publications and conferences.

Erasmus Mundus: MA in International Performance Research (MAIPR)

Nigel Thrift was eager for Warwick to secure one of the Erasmus Mundus awards for international masters degrees offered by the European Union. We applied for and won an award together with our partner universities in the Netherlands, Finland, Serbia and Ireland. Over the course of seven years, MAIPR hosted approximately 130 postgraduate students from 49 countries, plus 48 international distinguished guest scholars and practitioners as visiting faculty. Scholarships from the European Commission permitted a merit-based selection of talented students from many countries from Mexico and Colombia to China and Thailand to Malawi and South Africa. Each year it funded visits from an impressive range of senior scholars and artists from five continents, an immense enrichment to the programme, which would not have been possible without such structural support. In short, it assured that the scheme was truly international in both its student body and its staff, well beyond Europe and/or North America in its content, cultures, and methods. Many students went on to doctoral studies or to obtain significant employment in the Arts sector of their own or other countries. The core programme staff at Warwick included Milija (who succeeded me as Director of MAIPR), Silvija, Tim, Susan and Baz. Other staff such as Yvette, Margaret, and Jim contributed specific lectures. As Head of School, Jim also guided the Directors of MAIPR in the tricky navigation of institutional policy and regulations, which needed to be negotiated across the three initial partners, University of Amsterdam, University of Tampere and Helsinki, and later University of Belgrade and Trinity College Dublin. In 2017, four of the original MAIPR staff from Warwick, Helsinki, and Amsterdam edited International Performance Research Pedagogies (2017) which offered an account and assessment of the MAIPR years.

UKIERI and the India collaboration

Seed money for establishing teaching and research collaborations with foreign universities, in particular Indian and Australian ones, became available internally in 2008. Jim Davis and I travelled to Delhi to meet with staff in the School of the Arts at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) to explore the possibilities of long-term collaborations. With funds from Warwick’s International Office and IAS, we held two conferences, one in Delhi and one at Warwick in 2010 where staff from both locations shared research on such topics as Rethinking the Political, Documenting Performance, and Multiple Modernities and Historiography. As a result of these explorations, Bishnupriya Dutt (JNU) and I were awarded a UKIERI grant on the theme of Citizenship and Performance which was the first of several funded research projects and multiple co-teaching occasions resulting in various books, conference presentations, and student exchanges. The latest collaboration, funded by the British Academy and headed by Silvija Jestrovic and Bishnupriya Dutt was called Cultures of the Left and recently concluded with the publication of the collection Theatre, activism, subjectivity: Searching for the Left in a fragmented world (University of Manchester Press, 2024).

The International Federation for Theatre Research

The backbone of our internationalism might be said to be IFTR. Jim Davis had hosted an annual conference of the Federation in Sydney, Australia, in 2001 and had served on its Executive Committee. I had also served on the Ex Comm and as Vice President before my four-year term as President. In 2014 Jim hosted his second IFTR conference at Warwick. In 2025, Silvija has recently completed a term as Editor of Theatre Research International, the Federation’s journal, and currently Milija is on the Ex Comm and Tim is the Finance Officer for the organisation. In short, Warwick has been at the forefront of leadership in IFTR for over twenty years.

Teaching and research on home ground

Meanwhile we did very well in the Research Assessment Exercises in 2014 and 2021. A variety of research grants were won and completed by many members of staff ranging in scope from Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) support for a spectatorship project I co-led with the RSC, British Theatre Consortium, and our own Center for Media and Media Policy Studies (CCMPS), to Silvija’s recent Leverhulme Research Fellowship on ‘Worksites of Freedom and the Aesthetic of Solidarity’. With the retirements of myself and Baz by 2017, followed soon after by Jim, Susan, Margaret and Wallace McDowell (Senior Teaching Fellow), the end of an era was generally acknowledged as new staff were gradually hired with new research agendas and their own fresh ideas. Jim Davis’s untimely death in 2023 perhaps put the definitive close to this chapter in our history