Theatre and Performance Studies News

On Thursday 18th June 2026, Dr Ian Farnell hosted a sell-out screening of The People's Emergency Briefing at the Warwick Arts Centre.

The UK faces a growing climate and nature emergency, yet most people have never been fully briefed on what it means for our lives, our economy and our future. The People's Emergency Briefing sets out the risks facing the nation - and the credible, positive responses available - in a clear and accessible account designed for screenings in communities across the UK.

As well as organising and introducing the screening, Dr Farnell collaborated with members of the Warwickshire Wildlife Trust to lead a post-show discussion with attendees.

Dr. Rashna Nicholson, Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick, has been selected as a recipient of a 2025-26 British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for her project, "How a Discipline is Born: Performance Studies, the Asian Performing Arts and the Cold War (1955-1995)".

The award, valued at £135,442.69, will fund the first extensive reassessment of the emergence of Performance Studies. It will delineate how the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation-affiliated Asia Society, Japan Society, and JDR 3rd Fund smoothed the way for many moves beyond Western concepts of literature, drama, and the arts, comprising Performance Studies’ ‘broad-spectrum approach’.

Through exemplary case studies of institutional grants and fellowship programs, it will uncover the multi-layered history of how policy makers, experts, academics, and artists benchmarked a transregional consensus on theatre’s role in civil society, thereby assisting the US’ rise to global leadership in the arts.

The British Academy's Mid-Career Fellowships are "designed both to support outstanding individual researchers with excellent research proposals, and to promote public understanding and engagement with humanities and social sciences," according to the Academy's website