Professor Gianna Bouchard MA, PhD, FHEA, PGCLTHE

• BA Drama and Theatre Studies; University of Roehampton, 1998 
• MA Critical Theory (The Body and Representation); University of Reading, 1999
• PhD funded by the AHRC; University of Roehampton, 2007
• Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, 2021
• Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education

I originally trained in musical theatre at the Italia Conti Academy in London, followed by a number of years teaching drama, classical ballet and modern dance. I later graduated from Roehampton Institute, London, with a BA in Drama and Theatre Studies, then moving to the University of Reading to complete an MA in The Body and Representation, before returning to Roehampton for my PhD studies.

My PhD was titled ‘Performing the Anatomised Body’ and initiated my interest in the connections between medicine and performance. I have published widely on this interface, particularly as it relates to stagings of the female body.

My teaching has included a wide range of theoretical and practical modules at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including those focused on performance studies, politics and performance, dance theatre, live art, and devising performance.

I teach on a variety of compulsory and optional modules in the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, including Studio Practice, Performance: Theory, Practice and Critique, Dance Theatre, and Blood and Guts: Spectacles of the Body. I also supervise final year practice research and dissertation projects.

I am interested in supervising postgraduate projects in any aspect of performance and medicine, in live art, in the politics of identity and in contemporary performance practice.

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Find out more - our PhD Drama and Theatre Studies  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My research focuses on exploring specific medical discourses and practices, such as anatomical dissection, in order to analyse contemporary performance practice. My work has examined constructions of power and knowledge, ethics, visuality, spectatorship and theatricality in the work of ORLAN, Martin O'Brien and the Bodyworlds Exhibition, for instance, and has been published in a number of journals and edited collections, including Performance Research and Contemporary Theatre Review. My monograph, Performing Specimens: Biomedical Display in Contemporary Peformance was published by Bloomsbury Methuen in 2021. I have also published two co-edited books: Performance and the Medical Body (2016) and The Routledge Companion to Performance and Medicine (2024), both with Dr Alex Mermikides.

Recently, I have written chapters on surrogacy and issues of female reproroductive labour on the contemporary stage. I am currently developing work on performance and the NHS, with my collaborator, Alex Mermikides, and have plans to publish another monograph on theatre and biopolitics.