Dr Claire French

• 2019: PhD in Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK, funded by Commonwealth Scholarship Commission
• 2018: Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy, UK
• 2014: MA in Applied Theatre, Drama in the Community and Drama Education, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, UK
• 2007: BA in Theatre Studies, University of Notre Dame with Arts Management, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University, Australia

Prior to the University of Birmingham, I taught at the University of Warwick (UK) and Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (UK). I have completed two postdoctoral fellowships: The Arts Research Africa and Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Award at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) and the Institute of Advanced Studies Early Career Researcher Postdoctoral Award at the University of Warwick (UK). I currently hold Associate Fellowships at these two universities to maintain reciprocity and sustainability in my practice research collaborations. Additionally, I have research projects ongoing at The University of Sydney (Australia) and Aarhus University (Denmark).

I am also a practitioner, having worked as a dramaturg and producer across professional stages in London (UK), Berlin (Germany) and Perth (Aus) and as a facilitator of community practices in London, Birmingham (UK) and Johannesburg (SA), while developing projects challenging the intersections of these Euro/Anglo arts industry binaries. My documentary theatre carves out processes of making performance that privilege the storyteller in their unique social, epistemological and interactional context – to unearth new truths, new connections and new cultural literacies. I have experience across many articulations of diversity, facilitating intergenerational community groups (The Old Vic, London), elders (Visible Theatre, London), asylum seekers and refugees (Evelyn Oldfield Foundation, London) and leading open intercultural workshops (Creative Multilingualism, University of Oxford). Borrowing from my research, I seek to situate linguistic hegemonies in these multilingual, applied and autobiographical performance contexts.

More about my work can be found at clairefrench.com

My experience as a practitioner informs my praxis-based approach to teaching. I enjoy guiding students to step in and out of role as learners to develop their own plans for practice as facilitators and I play with this as a pedagogy in several modules. My teaching in the department focuses on the investigations of critical and reflective studio practices, dramaturgy and intercultural performance in and out of applied theatre settings. I am highly interdisciplinary, drawing from sociolinguistics and actor training in my research and allowing these to find their way into pedagogies. My current leadership and development of the MA Performance Practices: Applied Artists sees me exploring the strengths of the department and how they pair with the future of applied theatre and performance.

I am particularly interested in hearing from doctoral students exploring multilingual dramaturgies and methodologies in performance.

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

My recent practice research project 'Decolonising language ideologies in the body' with Sibusiso Mkhize developed improvisational approaches to multilingual South African (isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, English) performance making at the University of the Witwatersrand. This research advances decolonial, multilingual and intercultural theatre and performance frameworks and will be featured in three forthcoming chapters (2023) of edited collections as well as my monograph Making multilingual performance: Omission, alignment, disruption (Routledge 2023, Forthcoming).

Previous research projects have included Indigenous multilingual and intercultural dramaturgies with Professor Jaky Troy, University of Sydney; and translanguaging and youth art-making with Dr Rachael Jacobs for UNESCO and Western Sydney University.