We were delighted to welcome Professor Lynette Goddard (Royal Holloway), Professor Farah Karim-Cooper (King's College London and Shakespeare's Globe), and theatre-maker Selina Thompson to speak to their groundbreaking work on performance and race, at the first Performance Research Network seminar of the new academic year.

Each speaker offered a short provocation and took questions, followed by an informal discussion prompted by their ideas on the topic.

Professor Lynette Goddard spoke about ‘(Re)Presenting History and the Legacies of Slavery in Black British women’s playwriting'.

Lynette Goddard is Professor of Black Theatre and Performance at Royal Holloway, University of London, where they research contemporary Black British playwriting with a focus on the intersectional politics of race, gender, and sexuality. Their book publications include Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance (Palgrave, 2007), Contemporary Black British Playwrights: Margins to Mainstream (Palgrave, 2015), and Errol John’s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (Routledge, Fourth Wall, 2017). Their current research is about Black British theatre directors’ processes and productions and a project on how race is portrayed in contemporary plays through such themes as race, immigration and asylum, race, Black communities and the police, race and religion, and race and the rise of right-wing politicians.

Professor Farah Karim-Cooper spoke about 'The Case for Race in the Shakespeare Academy’.

Farah Karim-Cooper is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London and Head of Higher Education & Research at Shakespeare’s Globe. After serving three years as Trustee, she was recently elected as Vice-President of the Shakespeare Association of America. She curated the Shakespeare and Race Festival at Shakespeare’s Globe for three years in a row and is in the process of establishing a Scholars of Colour Network. She has published widely on Shakespeare, early modern bodies, race, women and beauty, performance and theatre history. Her main publications include, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (EUP 2006; Revised ed. 2019), The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (Arden 2016); recently she has edited The Duchess of Malfi for the Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama, ed. Jeremy Lopez (2020) and is currently writing a book on Shakespeare and Race.

Selina Thompson spoke about 'Black Performance as Freedom Practice/Praxis'.

Selina Thompson is an artist and performer based in the UK. Her work is playful, participatory and intimate, focused on the politics of identity, and how this defines our bodies, lives and environments. She has made work for pubs, cafes, hairdressers, toilets, and sometimes even galleries and theatres, including Spill Festival of Performance, The National Theatre Studio, The Birmingham REP, East Street Arts and the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Selina’s critically acclaimed solo show salt. won The Stage Edinburgh Award, The Total Theatre Award for Experimentation, Innovation and Playing with Form and The Filipa Brangaca Award for Best Female Solo Performance.