Dr David Coates has worked with Nicola Allen (Archivist at Woburn Abbey) to set up a Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) with the Bedford Estates. This means that they have secured a funded PhD position to start in October 2024. The project that they will co-supervise will interrogate the complex relationships between theatre and the aristocracy in the long nineteenth century. There is flexibility in the CDA's design, enabling the chosen candidate to find their own area of interest within this broad topic. They're now looking for prospective candidates to apply for the position, and David would be delighted to hear from anyone interested (D.J.Coates@warwick.ac.uk). Full details on the project can be found by clicking on this news story.

Winners of WATE Award

The Arts Faculty Award recognises the achievements of Warwick's outstanding educators who have enabled excellent learning, creating the conditions within which all students are supported and empowered to succeed and thrive.

Winner - Ian Farnell (Theatre and Performance Studies, School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures)

Commended - Ronan Hatfull (Theatre and Performance Studies, School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures)

Winner - David Coates (Theatre and Performance Studies, School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures)

SCUDD 2021: Beyond Inclusion

 The annual SCUDD conference will take place online on Thursday 24^th and Friday 25^thJune 2021.

The aim of this conference is to bring together artists, academics, and students to think together about the politics of inclusion: its opportunities, challenges, and limits. The conference begins with a sense that institutional work on diversity and inclusion has tended to rearrange the deckchairs but leave the ship intact and on course for disaster. This conference seeks to identify and interrogate inequalities of access, safety, and opportunity across experiences of exclusion. The purpose here is to identify both the specificities of lived experiences of structural and systemic exclusion but also to look across exclusory practices and phenomena to build resistive solidarities. Moreover, the conference will debate what it might mean to shift the conversation away from inclusion, which retains a sense of the centre enveloping the margin, and instead think through the possibilities for our campuses and our industry to become sites of anti-exclusion.  

The Standing Conference of University Drama Departments (SCUDD) represents the interests of Drama, Theatre and Performance in the Higher Education sector in the UK. SCUDD acts as a mediator with bodies such as funding councils, the AHRC and the Arts Councils and is consulted by such organisations when matters of future policy are discussed and decided. Its annual conference concerns topics, issues and debates relevant to those working in drama, theatre and performance in HE. This year’s conference will make space for reflections on working in our field during covid-19 and will continue discussions around advocacy for - and threats to - the discipline. As part of the conference, SCUDD’s AGM will take place. The conference will be free to attend.  

Hosts: This year’s conference will be hosted online by the School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures at the University of Warwick. The conference organisers working in partnership with the SCUDD Exec are Dr Anna Harpin, Dr David Coates and Dr Tim White.  

Programme and Registration: Details about how to register for the conference and a full programme of panels and events will be released closer to the conference.

Queries: If you have any questions or queries about the conference at this stage, please don’t hesitate to get in touch off list using D.J.Coates@warwick.ac.uk  

It is available through the library or https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/67DYCCYI6AXQ9DQWCUEY/full?target=10.1080/13528165.2020.1736751