Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies

School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures

Tel: +44 (0)24 765 74773
Email: m dot gluhovic at warwick dot ac dot uk

FAB 1.44 Faculty of Arts Building, SCAPVC
University of Warwick, University Road, Coventry CV4 7AL

About

Milija Gluhovic is Professor in Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Milija joined the School in September of 2006. He holds a BA in English (Hons) from the University of Novi Sad, an MA in English from the University of British Columbia, and a PhD in Drama from the University of Toronto (2005). He was Director of the Erasmus Mundus MA in International Performance Research (2010-2015), an EU-sponsored programme taught collaboratively by the University of Warwick, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Helsinki, the University of Arts in Belgrade, and Trinity College Dublin. He currently serves as an elected member of the Executive Committee for the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR).

Research interests

My research interests include: contemporary European theatre and performance; memory studies and psychoanalysis; discourses of European identity, migrations and human rights; religion, secularity, and politics; contemporary North American and North African theatre and performance, and international performance research and pedagogy.

My interest in memory and history has resulted in Performing European Memories: Trauma, Ethics, Politics (2013), which explores the intersections between contemporary European theatre and performance, the interdisciplinary field of memory studies, and current preoccupations with the politics of memory in Europe. The book examines the contradictions, specificities, continuities and discontinuities in the European shared and unshared pasts as represented in the works of Harold Pinter, Tadeusz Kantor, and Heiner Müller, Andrzej Wajda, Artur Zmijewski and other European artists, showing different ways in which they engage with the traumatic experiences of the Holocaust, the Stalinist Gulags, colonialism, and imperialism, challenge their audiences' historical imagination, and renew their affective engagement with Europe's past.

From 2010–2012 I convened (with Karen Fricker, Brock University) an AHRC-funded international, interdisciplinary research network titled “Eurovision Song Contest and the ‘New’ Europe”. The projected resulted in an edited volume entitled Performing the 'New' Europe: Identities, Feelings, and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest (2013). Bringing together the voices of scholars from Europe and North America with those of key contest stakeholders, the book argues that this popular music competition is a symbolic contact zone between European cultures: an arena for European identification in which both national solidarity and participation in a European identity are confirmed, and a site where cultural struggles over the meanings, frontiers and limits of Europe are enacted. This book/project received world-wide media attention: it was discussed in media outlets including The New York Times, the Guardian, The Times, CNN, BBC, and the CBC and it received the University of Warwick Inaugural Arts Impact Award.

My interest in critical approaches to performance and developing understandings of the socio-political importance of cultural practice has resulted in Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation, and Politics (Palgrave, 2017; with Jisha Menon), which develops comparative methodological approaches to the analysis of the secular and considers the ways ‘the secular’ has been translated into theatre and performance studies. Together with colleagues from Amsterdam and Helsinki I also edited a volume of essays entitled International Performance Research Pedagogy: The Unconditional Discipline? (Palgrave, 2018). The anthology critically reflects on teaching Theatre and Performance Studies in an international university classroom while addressing the broader question of the critical link between the discipline of Performance Studies and Humanities education in the contemporary university in the context of globalisation.

I have recently completed a monograph Theory for Theatre Studies: Memory (2020) for the newly established series ‘Theory for Theatre Studies’ at Methuen. Engaging in reflection and analysis of a global range of performances, histories, and archives from such contested zones as post-dictatorship Argentina, Europe, Israel/Palestine, Canada and Japan, the book illustrates the centrality of memory for the theatre as well as the vital role of theatre in making political claims and interventions and transmitting individual and collective memories. I have also co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance, 2021) with Silvija Jestrovic, Shirin Rai, and Michael Saward; this volume promises to provide a rigorous, thoroughgoing exploration of the key themes involved in the study of this interdisciplinary field of research and scholarship. Finally, I have recently collaborated with colleagues from Warwick and JNU (New Delhi) on the British Academy funded Partnership and Mobility Project 'Cultures of the Left: Manifestations and Performances.' https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/theatre_s/research/current/culturesoftheleft/

I am currently leading an interdisciplinary research project ''Thinking through the Silk Roads. Cross-cultural Exchanges and Mobilities.’ This is an EUTOPIA Connected Community research network that proposes an innovative framework for the study of cultural productions, visual arts and performances, cultural heritage, and geocultural politics, emergent in the broad context of old and new Silk Roads. It draws on the expertise of a strong team with regional and linguistic expertise covering South/Southeast Europe, Central and Southeast Asia, all with established collaborations across the academic networks and beyond. Building on concepts and insights from theatre performance studies, art history, critical heritage studies, anthropology, cultural studies and international relations/geopolitics, SILK calls for new research and approaches on how we should situate the mobilisation of the Silk Roads imaginary historically, culturally, and geopolitically within international affairs, and how the Silk Roads concept is localised, interpreted, and contested within existing national and regional cultural contexts. To address such questions we examine Silk Roads festivals, biennials, heritage and museum projects alongside artistic practices, leisure mobilities, and geo-cultural discourses in Southeast/Eastern Europe, Central, Southeast and East Asia.

I hold membership in Warwick’s Performance and Politics Interdisciplinary Research Network, GRP Connecting Cultures, and Social Theory Centre. In the international arena, I have been an active member in major international TPS associations: IFTR, PSi, CATR, ASTR, and TaPRA. I serve as a member of the Executive Committees of the International Federation for Theatre Research and the European Association for the Study of Theatre and Performance. I am also the Associate Editor of Brill’s ‘Themes in Theatre’ book series and serves on the editorial board of the European Journal of Theatre and Performance.

I currently supervise two postdoctoral fellows, eight PhD students and one MRes student. I welcome applications to study for MA by Research, MPhil and PhD on areas of research interest relating to those outlined above.