Projects
There have been several major grants, awards and prizes for staff in Drama at The University of Manchester.
Recent projects
Care Aesthetics: Research Exploration (CARE) is a project in Drama led by Professor James Thompson. CARE asks what happens when we consider care a craft or artful practice.
Dr. Jenny Hughes pursued this project as an AHRC Early Career Fellowship from 2014-16. It explored the relationship between theatre, performance and poverty by interrogating their interstices at three distinct historical junctures (in the 1830s, 1980s, and the 2010s).
Professor Maggie Gale has been awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust (2014-17), in order to develop research that critically interrogates early twentieth-century British performance cultures. Drama, theatre and film are considered alongside musical comedy, revue and other populist forms, and in relation to legislation and social and psychoanalytic theory. The research explores the ways in which repeated motifs of estrangement, fear of the ‘other’ and transformations in the experience of identity and citizenship, can be understood through a social history of cultural production.
A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900 -1939: Law, Surveillance and the Body
Professor Stephen Bottoms is playing a leading role in an inter-disciplinary, multi-institutional consortium of researchers who have been awarded £1.5million by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a 3-year project (2014-17) titled "Towards Hydro-Citizenship". Based at four comparative case-study sites around the UK, the project will work to develop dialogues within and between communities living in the vicinity of water (ocean, rivers, canals, etc.). Creative initiatives including performance and film-making will be used to to explore and reflect residents’ sense of their "eco-social" relationships with, and responsibilities for, the water environment – at a time when flood and drought risk, in particular, are growing concerns due to climate change.
The Hydro-Citizenship initiative builds directly on Steve's previous projects relating to these themes, including the AHRC network "Reflecting on Environmental Change through Site-Based Performance" (2010-11) and its follow-on project "Multi-Story Water" (2012-13).