Professor Nicolas Whybrow is retiring early at the end of October 2020 owing to recent ill health. He is a long-time member of Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick, joining in February 2004. A former Head of School (2014-2017), Nicolas taught across a range of modules, most notably Performance and the Contemporary City and Live Art and Performance. In 2010 he won the Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence.

Nicolas played a leading role in the University’s research culture, being appointed as thematic lead for two of its GRPs, Sustainable Cities and Connecting Cultures. In 2017-2020 he was the PI on a 3-year AHRC-funded practice-as-research project entitled Sensing the City, which culminated in a multi-medial exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry and an edited book, Urban Sensographies (2021). Meanwhile, his book Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe: the Work of Art in the Complex City appeared in 2020.

Further details about Nicolas are available on his staff webpage. Happily, he retains his connection to the University as Professor Emeritus.

We are happy announce that Dr Pedzisai Maedza will be joining us on 1 January on a 2-year Newton International Fellowship to work on the project 'Chains of Memory in the postcolony: Performing and Remembering the Namibian Genocide'. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at the University of Zimbabwe. He received his PhD from University of Cape-Town, SA, in 2018; with a DAAD scholarship that facilitated his research at Mainz University. Pedzisai is a writer, director, actor as well as someone who has published widely. In 2017 his monograph Performing Asylum: Theatre of Testimony in South Africa was published by the African Studies Centre at University of Leiden, Netherlands. http://www.ascleiden.nl/news/performing-asylum-theatre-testimony-south-africa. We look forward to working with Dr Maedza in the time he is with us at Warwick.

One of our recent alumni, Matthew Randle-Bent, has just published an article in the last issue of Contemporary Theatre Review (CTR). The title of the piece is 'A Machine Against Itself: Participation in the Theatre of Nassim Soleimanpour'.

On Wednesday 14th October 2020 Theatre and Performance Studies hosted a book launch from 4.30pm-6pm

During this session we celebrated the fact that researchers in Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick will have published five monographs in the six months from July 2020:

Nicholas Drofiak - Irusan: or, Canting for Architects, gta Verlag / eth Zürich

Milija Gluhovic - Theory for Theatre Studies: Memory, Bloomsbury

Nadine Holdsworth - English Theatre and Social Abjection: A Divided Nation, Palgrave

Silvija Jestrovic - Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence: The Author Dies Hard, Palgrave

Nicolas Whybrow - Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe: the work of Art in the Complex City, Bloomsbury

Each author gave brief introduction to their book outlining the things that inspired them and the central arguments they make. There was time to ask questions and to raise a virtual glass to this achievement.