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, University of London in July 2009, after completing her PhD at the University of Liverpool. To date her research has principally focused on Latin American cinemas in comparative context. Her doctoral thesis focused on contemporary Argentine and Brazilian women’s filmic production (1990-2007), with a particular emphasis on the role of the body in light of the repressive dictatorial regimes suffered in both countries.

Prior to embarking on doctoral research Charlotte completed a Master’s degree in World Cinemas at the University of Leeds, providing a highly comparative and global 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. In addition, her Master’s dissertation on Colombian cinema familiarised her with the growing bibliography of indigenous media and film from this country.

She is particularly interested in issues of memory and cultural transmission, and how the audio-visual industries intersect with these debates. As Postdoctoral Research Associate, her project ‘The Promise of Fourth Cinema: Negotiating Indigenous Filmmaking on a Global Platform’ will consider how indigenous films are projected and received in different festival and community contexts, drawing on a number of case studies from Latin America and Australia. Charlotte speaks French, Spanish and Portuguese and welcomes enquiries and contributions related to the area of indigenous filmmaking and Latin American cultural production more generally.

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.