Helen Gilbert moved to Royal Holloway in 2005 to take up a chair in Theatre Studies after more than a decade working at the University of Queensland in Australia. She is currently Director of her department’s new Centre for International Theatre and Performance Research and Co-convenor of the university’s interdisciplinary Postcolonial Research Group. Over the last fifteen years, her research has spanned texts and performances drawn from diverse cultures in the English-speaking world, with special emphasis on contemporary theatre in Australasia, Canada and the Caribbean. Thematically, she has concentrated on issues relating to race relations, indigeneity, cultural identity, nationalism, and the politics and aesthetics of cross-cultural engagement in both Western and non-Western contexts. Her major publications include Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-cultural Transactions in Australasia (co-authored with Jacqueline Lo, 2007); Sightlines: Race, Gender and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre (1998); Post-colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (with Joanne Tompkins, 1996); and several edited volumes in postcolonial theatre and cultural studies.

As Principal Investigator, Helen will manage the overall project and write a book-length monograph on transnational and cross-cultural aspects of indigenous performance and its reception across the Americas, the Pacific, Australia and South Africa. She is particularly interested in the issue of heritage, the impact of globalization on local performance cultures, and how embodiment informs links between place, mobility and belonging. Conceptually, her research aims to extend performance-based interdisciplinary methods for analyzing indigeneity in all its complexity.

Estelle Castro completed her PhD on contemporary Aboriginal Literature at the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III and the University of Queensland in 2007. She has translated the works of Indigenous poets and writers into French and taught Australian Studies at Paris XII University. 

Her thesis focused on works of fiction by Terri Janke, Kim Scott, Sam Watson, Eric Willmot and Alexis Wright, and poetry by Lisa Bellear, Lionel Fogarty, Romaine Moreton, Kerry Reed-Gilbert and Samuel Wagan Watson. Her research has sought to interrogate how Indigenous poetic, political, spiritual and axiological concerns are reconfigured through performances and negotiated in the literary and the socio-political fields. Issues regarding the status and effectiveness of oral transmission and literature in cross-cultural and intergenerational contexts are of particular interest to her.

Her role as a Postdoctoral Research Associate for the project consists in examining the circulation and reception of indigenous performance in arts festivals and cultural events in France and Britain from the 1980s to the present, with an in-depth focus on Aboriginal performances. She will bring in a comparative dimension through the analysis of strategies developed in writers’ and arts festivals in Australia and the Franco/pluriphone Pacific. Literary expressions and creation in Indigenous Australia and Polynesia will be a core focus of her research.

Charlotte Gleghorn joined Royal Holloway in July 2009, after completing her PhD at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests lie in the field of Latin American film studies, with a particular emphasis on the political work of cinema and its relationship to processes of memory. Her doctoral thesis focused on contemporary Argentine and Brazilian women’s film production, examining the role of the cinematic body in relation to the repressive dictatorial regimes experienced in both countries.

Prior to undertaking doctoral research, Charlotte completed an MA in World Cinemas at the University of Leeds, providing a highly comparative understanding of the dynamics of film production and introducing her to the concept of ‘Fourth Cinema’ as elaborated by Barry Barclay, the late Maori filmmaker. This experience informs her research, which seeks to establish a critical dialogue with theoretical perspectives on Indigenous filmmaking both within and beyond Latin America.

Her current project explores the configurations of auteurship, authority and cultural memory in relation to Indigenous film production in Latin America. This research considers the political and aesthetic contributions of documentary and fiction films that are produced by, or in some cases in collaboration with, Indigenous filmmakers and communities. Charlotte speaks French, Spanish and Portuguese and welcomes enquiries related to Indigenous filmmaking and Latin American cultural production more generally.

His research explores the ways in which constructions of indigeneity relate to both the naturalization of inequalities and the resistance to subordination. His doctoral thesis examined the emergence of indigenous challenges to dominant constructions of social identity in the Ecuadorian highlands. Considering ethnic categorization as relational, contextual and performative, his analysis demonstrates that these challenges have been fundamental for the articulation of ethnic demands and the revitalization of indigenous cultures.

As a post-doctoral researcher at Royal Holloway, Sergio aims to elucidate the political work of indigenous festive performance in Andean countries. His project will focus on the ways in which indigenous performance has become explicitly political, subverting hegemonic formations of identity and alterity, and questioning the normalization of indigenous subordination.

Genner’s main interests are related to ethno-political movements, intercultural dialogue, and subaltern epistemologies, with a particular focus on the transformative work of NGOs and Indigenous organizations in the Yucatan Peninsula. His doctoral research examined forms of Indigenous knowledge in intercultural education projects in Latin America, especially in Ecuador and Mexico, underlining the ways in which cultures of schooling continue to marginalize local learning practices.

His post-doctoral research investigates the strategic transformation of ritual and performance in the political mobilization of Mayan heritage for greater social justice and recognition. He is interested in exploring how these renewed performances of indigeneity are affecting how people think about their own identities and cultures. In addition, he aims to identify the main strategies and influences that render these performances meaningful and appealing to different audiences, and how they are re-appropriated and/or contested by competing social actors. He also keeps a multi-lingual blog on Mayan voices and interculturality at: http://tsikbaloob.blogspot.com

Arifani Moyo completed his MA in Drama and Performance Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, in 2009. His theoretical understanding of performance is equally informed by his varied intercultural experiences as a performer, creator and occasional trainer in university, professional, fringe, primary school and secondary school contexts.

His research interests include African postmodern and postcolonial philosophies, and, more generally, performance praxis as related to myriad systems, processes and modalities of cultural, social and political engagement. His MA dissertation focused on the early plays and related theories of renowned and controversial South African avant-garde community theatre practitioner, Brett Bailey, who has worked extensively with African traditional performance praxes within the context of indigenous belief systems.

Arifani’s research for the Indigeneity project, which will lead to a PhD thesis, approaches the topic of indigeneity in the ‘new’ South Africa by interrogating the use of ‘tribal’ aesthetics in certain mainstream intercultural dance and musical theatre ventures that have a ‘national’ ideological aim. He will engage with critical insights offered by African theatre and postcolonial intellectual discourse, along with global perspectives on performance, culture, society and indigeneity.

Dani Phillipson is a research assistant on the ‘Indigeneity in the Contemporary World: Performance, Politics, Belonging’ project at Royal Holloway.  She has previously served as a lecturer and assistant professor in the Theatre Department of the University of Regina, Canada. She has also undertaken a project on the historical development and transmission of theatrical celebrity as a visiting research fellow at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Regina. She has a background in theatre production and has worked with a variety of professional, community, and student companies in a number of technical roles. 

With indigenous groups she has undertaken theatre tours to remote communities, assisted in the development of First Nations productions for a Canadian regional theatre company, facilitated the creation of autobiographical fringe shows, supervised student productions within a university setting, and served as a member of the dramaturgical committee of the Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre.

Performance, either directly or indirectly, is the result of a multiplicity of voices. This is true even when only one speaker is apparent. Dani is particularly interested in the hidden voices that underlie and influence the development, the presentation and the reception of performances.

As a member of the intermission interarts collective Dylan has collaborated on works that bridge art music performance and installation in Mexico, Russia, Canada and the UK. His academic research has similarly emphasised interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches in co-edited collections including Opera Indigene (Ashgate, 2011) and co-convened events such as the workshop Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Music in Canada (with Mary Ingraham, University of Alberta).

Dylan’s current research investigates the degree to which the spectacle of reconciliation conveys the necessarily agonistic process of restorative justice. Addressing Indigenous art music projects that feature native musicians as soloists or members of ensembles, as well as art music by Native American and First Nations composers, the study explores how such performance re-imagines the sites and sounds of concert protocol, displacing the normative rules that govern the spaces of the concert hall. More broadly, his research will theorize how Indigenous epistemology and worldviews might impact upon the re-telling of music history in North America.