Leverhulme Trust Funding Success for OU and Warwick University collaboration

Professor Dennis Walder of the Arts Faculty has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Project Grant of £140, 826 for a three-year joint project with Dr Yvette Hutchison of the University of Warwick, entitled ‘Performing Memory: theatricalising identity in contemporary South Africa’ . The grant is to fund two full-time PhD students, as well as travel and archival work.

Professor Walder is Director of the Ferguson Centre for African & Asian Studies, where one of the students will be based, and a South African theatre archive established; the other will be supervised by Dr Hutchison, an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick.

Both Walder and Hutchison have wide experience of research and publication in the South African theatre context – Walder’s work on playwright Athol Fugard is well known - and they recently co-edited a special Africa Issue of Contemporary Theatre Review. The Ferguson Centre is engaged in a number of projects related to memory, identity and nation, and is building up an archive of research materials.

The aim of the new project is to explore how formal processes of remembering and recording the contested histories of South Africa – such as the Truth and Reconciliation hearings – are related to popular performative representations including plays, installations, memorials, film and TV. The outcomes of the project will include a book and several articles.