Notes on Contributors
Mireia Aragay
is Professor of English Literature and Theatre at the University of Barcelona and Life Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Her publications include Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship (editor; Rodopi, 2005), British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics (co-editor; Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Ethical Speculations in Contemporary British Theatre (co-editor; Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), “Theatre and Spectatorship”, a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (co-editor, 2016), and Of Precariousness: Vulnerabilities, Responsibilities, Communities in 21st-century British Drama and Theatre (co-editor; De Gruyter, 2017). She is Principal Investigator of the Contemporary British Theatre Barcelona research group (www.ub.edu/cbtbarcelona/) and General Editor of Atlantis. Journal of the Spanish Association of English Studies (www.atlantisjournal.org/).
Julia Boll
holds a research position at Konstanz University, where she investigates the diachronic representation of the bare life on stage, a project for which, as PI, she received funding from the German Research Foundation. She has spoken and published on the representation of war, violence, grief and pornography; ethics in literature on science; neoliberalism in European playwriting; theatre and utopia; and the bare life on stage. Her monograph The New War Plays was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013. She is currently co-convenor of the Political Performances Working Group at the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR).
Paola Botham
(née Sotomayor) is Lecturer in Drama at Birmingham City University, UK. Her main research interests are modern and contemporary British theatre, especially political and documentary forms, and Hispanic drama. Her publications include chapters on the contemporary history play for Twenty-First Century Drama: What Happens Now (2016), on Caryl Churchill for Modern British Playwriting: The 1970s (2012) and on tribunal theatre for Political Performances: Theory and Practice (2009). She has also contributed several articles to international journals such as Contemporary Theatre Review, the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English and Nuestra América. She is currently working on the monograph Political Theatre Reconstructed.
Marco Galea
is Senior Lecturer in theatre and Director of Research of the School of Performing Arts at the University of Malta. He has published several works on Maltese theatre history and on postcolonial theatre, and edited volumes on Maltese and European theatre-makers. A book of theatre reviews he edited won the Malta National Book Council Prize for Research for 2017. He has also been active in the voluntary sector, serving as president of the Malta Union of Writers (L-Akkademja tal-Malti) between 2005 and 2007. His most recent publication is Redefining Theatre Communities (co-edited with Szabolcs Musca for Intellect Books, 2020).
Pujya Ghosh
is pursuing her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawarharlal Nehru University. She has taught Sociology and Theatre at the Shri Ram School for the last four years. Her research examines the relationship between politics and performance in the 1960s and 1970s from the perspective of the cultural, intellectual and political shift that took place in that period. Currently, she focuses on contemporary people’s movements and performance mediations, working on a suitable theory-history interface that integrates oral history and cultural memory into her critical-methodological approach to political and theatrical events. Other fields of research include the spaces of the political, performance interventions, civil society, spectatorship, community engagement and citizenship.
Aneta Głowacka
is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Culture Studies, University of Silesia in Katowice. She holds a doctorate in Humanities from the same university. Her research focuses on the aesthetic changes characteristic of twentieth- and twenty-first-century drama in Poland, the connections between theatre and popular culture, and political theatre. She is currently working on the book Aesthetics of Popular Culture in Polish Theatre after 1989. As a theatre critic she contributes to culture and theatre magazines in Poland. She is also editor of the theatre section of the Polish magazine Opcje (Options). She is a member of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR), the Polish Society for Theatre Research and the International Association of Theatre Critics (Polish section).
Camila González Ortiz
is a theatre director, researcher and translator. She holds a doctorate in Latin American Studies from King’s College London. Her research focuses on Chilean theatre history and politics, performance-as-protest and the relationship between theatre and neoliberalism within the Latin American context. Her writing has been published in Revista Apuntes de Teatro, e-misférica, Études and Revista Hiedra. Her work as a director has been presented in England, Northern Ireland and Chile. She is also a member of Out of the Wings Collective, which specialises in translating and promoting drama from the Spanish-speaking world in the UK. She has translated plays by Caryl Churchill, Chris Thorpe and Chilean dramatist Pablo Manzi. She is currently based in London.
Bérénice Hamidi-Kim
is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Lyon 2 University and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is co-editor of the electronic journal thaêtre and a regular contributor to the journal Parages (TNS/Solitaires intempestifs). She has published Les Cités du théâtre politique en France depuis 1989, with a preface by Luc Boltanski (L’Entretemps, 2013), and co-authored, with Séverine Ruset, Troupes, compagnies, collectifs dans les arts vivants. Organisations du travail, processus de création, conjonctures (L’Entretemps, 2018).
Fatine Bahar Karlıdağ
is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Yeditepe University in Istanbul, Turkey. She received her PhD from the School of Drama, University of Washington, Seattle, where she was also a Fulbright Visiting Research Program scholar (2012-2013). Her research concentrates on the historical representation of the radical left in English and American theatre and performance, as well as contemporary labour activism in Turkey. She has presented conference papers at the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) and the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) and writes essays and reviews for Theatre Times.
José Ramón Prado-Pérez
is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Universitat Jaume I de Castelló. He specialises in contemporary British theatre with an emphasis on post-war political drama. He is a member of the Contemporary British Theatre Barcelona research group (www.ub.edu/cbtbarcelona/). He has published articles on Caryl Churchill, Pam Gems, Punchdrunk and Theatre Uncut and has been involved with Theatre Uncut as a performer and translator since 2013. He contributes regularly to the Gale Cengage Learning Encyclopedia, Shakespearean Criticism Series and Drama Criticism Series, as academic advisor. Other research interests include film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays and contemporary British metafiction. He is currently on the board of the academic journal Culture, Language and Representation (Universitat Jaume I).
Trish Reid
is Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Pro Vice-Chancellor (Education) at Kingston University, London. She has published a number of chapters and articles on contemporary British theatre with a particular emphasis on Scotland. She is the author of The Theatre of Anthony Neilson (2017) and Theatre & Scotland (2013). More recently Trish has written for Contemporary Theatre Review on the work of the black British playwright debbie tucker green and for the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English on the dystopian turn in British playwriting. She has a chapter on “Regions and Nations” in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to British Theatre Since 1945. Trish is co-convenor of the Political Performances Working Group of the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR). She is from Glasgow.
Mikko-Olavi Seppälä
defended his thesis on the history of the Finnish workers’ theatres at the University of Helsinki in 2007. He currently works as a lecturer and adjunct professor at the same university, where he teaches theatre history. His major interests are the history of political and popular theatre. In his current research project, Seppälä examines Finnish migrant theatre in Sweden and in Northern America. He has written several books in Finnish, including a history of Finnish theatre, a history of Finnish workers’ theatres, a cultural history of 1920s Helsinki and biographies of both the comic singer J. Alfr. Tanner and the poet Aale Tynni.
Madli Pesti
holds a PhD in theatre research from Tartu University, Estonia (dissertation: Political Theatre and its Strategies in the Estonian and Western Cultures, 2016). She currently works as a researcher in the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, where she runs the practice-as-research PhD programme. Her research areas are performance analysis and theory, political and applied theatre, and contemporary theatre. In 2018 she published 100 Years of Estonian Theatre. She has also been writing theatre reviews since 2002, winning best theatre critic at the Estonian Annual Theatre Awards in 2019. She was head of the Estonian Theatre Researchers’ and Critics’ Association in 2015 and curated the programme of the new performing arts centre Vaba Lava (Open Space) in Tallinn between 2015 and 2017.
Andy Smith
is a theatre-maker whose recent works include SUMMIT (2018), COMMONISM (2017) and The Preston Bill (2015). He has collaborated with Tim Crouch since 2004, co-directing (with Karl James) a number of works including An Oak Tree (2005), The Author (2009) and, most recently, Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation (2019). In 2013, Tim and Andy wrote and performed what happens to the hope at the end of the evening together. Andy is Lecturer in Theatre Practice at the University of Manchester.
Evi Stamatiou
is a PhD candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, and Senior Lecturer in theatre and programme leader of the BA (Hons) Acting at the University of Chichester. Her research interests include social equality in actor training, practice-based research and social representations of marginalised identities in drama. She is an award-winning actor, writer and director who works across stage and screen, with more than sixteen years of international experience. Since 2011, she has been training actors at UK conservatoires and universities. See www.evistamatiou.com for further details.
Wei Zheyu
is a lecturer in drama at Guangxi Arts University, PR China. Wei received his BA at Sun Yat-sen University and MA at Nanjing University, both in English Language and Literature. He was a Trinity Long Room Hub Fellow (2013-2017) and was awarded his PhD at Trinity College Dublin in 2017. Wei has published several articles on contemporary Chinese theatre, intercultural theatre and intermedial performance studies. He is also a theatre translator and playwright. Wei’s current research is funded by the Young College Scholars Research Development Programme of Guangxi [Guangxigaoxiao zhongqingnian jiaoshi keyan jichunengli tisheng xiangmu], “Contemporary Intermedial Theatre Studies in the Context of Globalization” [quanqiuhuayujing xia dangdai juchang humeiti yingyong yanjiu] (2019KY0505).