Rachel Fensham
Research Professor, Head of Department
Qualifications:
PhD (Monash)
MA, GDMD, B Arts (Hons) (Melbourne)
Contact:
Email:r.fensham@surrey.ac.uk
Telephone: 01483 6866512
Personal Statement:
Rachel Fensham is an arts and humanities scholar who specialises in dance, theatre and performance studies from a cultural studies perspective. In 2003 she was invited as Visiting Professor at the Department of Dance History and Theory at the University of California Riverside and in 2005 she coordinated a research project on global trade cultures in Cambodia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Informed by the semiotics of theatre and performance, her research extends from the theoretical to the practical, and is sustained by an active engagement with the history and politics of representation, particularly of race and gender. In this regard, she has just completed a monograph called To Watch Theatre (Peter Lang, 2009) that argues for the significance of spectatorship to an understanding of contemporary tragedy. This research is to be followed with a longitudinal European study of ‘going to the theatre’ that will be conducted in Germany, France, Croatia, and the United Kingdom.
As Head of the Department of Dance, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Surrey, in addition to managing the expansion of the Department, Fensham led the RAE submission that received acclaim for its world-leading research in postcolonial performance, popular dance and Renaissance studies. She is currently Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded research project, called Modern Dance Pioneers: Women in British Dance, 1900-1930, and will be presenting a paper on how moving image archives contribute to research on cultural memory at the Open University conference on the Visual Image on May 27 2009. As co-convenor of an AHRC Network project (Kings, Royal Holloway, Surrey) on Indigeneity and Performance, examining the globalisation of indigenous identity through performance, she will chair a symposium on orality and the transmission of cultural knowledge on May 15, 2009.
With a previous career in cultural policy and planning, she has been appointed Chair of the Cultural Engagement Strategy for the University of Surrey and has been instrumental in the merger between the Guildford School of Acting and the University which has established a public-private sector partnership for the delivery of vocational arts training. As Chair of the Performance and Pedagogy working group for Performance Studies International, she is leading a research project to examine the impact of performance studies on higher education sector in the international context. In support of graduate education in the performing arts, she is convenor of an AHRC Collaborative Postgraduate Training grant shared with Chichester and Royal Holloway.
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