Academic Staff

• Contemporary literary novels

• Crossover or genre fiction

• Historical Fiction

• Fiction which explores the changing role of women

• Critical proposals relating to the young women writers of the Sixties

• A wide range of contemporary British fiction

• All kinds of international/multi-culture fiction

• Historical fiction and alternate universe

• Afro-diaspora interests

• Verse fiction/ experimental fiction

• screenwriting

• genre fiction

• screen adaptation

• the writing of novel and film sequels

• writing comedy

• Autobiographical writing

• Women’s writing

• Postcolonial fiction

• Children’s fiction

• Female genital mutilation in Africa and the UK

• The fusion of creative writing and dramatherapy

• Contemporary Fiction

• Popular Culture

• Children's Books

• Screenwriting

• Criticism

• Performance and Dub Poetry

• Engaging reluctant readers

• Expressing multiculturalism

• Poetry in political struggles

• Established undergraduate and post-graduate courses in creative writing at Brunel

• Contributor to numerous journals and conferences on creative writing

• Particularly interested in connections between literature and dance

• Published on contemporary Irish poets – Heaney, Boland, MCGuckian, Ni Dhomhnaill, Dorcey

• Particularly interested in feminist and psychological critical perspectives

• Contributor to Humanities Literature Insights (E Books)

• Rap music, in particular UK Hip-Hop and Grime

• Contemporary black British literature and culture

• Poetry and the performance event

• Orality, technology, embodiment and the production of collective memory

• Victorian sensation fiction

• The Brontës

• First-wave feminism

• Neo-Victorianism

• Gender and popular culture

• Early modern printing and the dissemination of printed texts in England, Portugal and Spain
• The patronage and financing of the book trade in early modern Europe
• The Reformation in print
• Printed editions of early modern drama (from the sixteenth to the 21st century)
• Bibliography, editorial theory and paleography

• British modernist poetry

• Thom Gunn

• American modernist poetry

• Creative writing (poetry)
  

• Romanticism
• Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literature
• Jane Austen and George Eliot
  
• Literature and Philosophy
• Jacques Derrida and the History of Philosophy

• Mass-Observation

• Modern and Contemporary British Literature (1900 – )

• ‘New Humanities’ and Interdisciplinary Narrative Research

• Science Fiction and Fantasy

• Global modernisms

• Postcolonial and world literatures: 20th century to contemporary

• Caribbean literatures

• Gender issues, women’s writing and feminist perspectives

• Renaissance literature and culture, esp the court masque and civic pageantry, city comedy, revenge and political drama

• Caroline and civil war writing

• Literary and cultural geographies and orientalism, early modern Irish and Scottish cultures

• Patronage and collecting, esp libraries

• Manliness, sexualities and book culture including modern and contemporary gay writing and queer theory

• Book and manuscript culture, verse libels and literary circulations, censorship, and textual editing

• Shakespeare’s History plays

• Shakespeare Authorship Question

• Shakespeare’s Audience

• Elizabethan Processional literature

• Irish Literature
• Autobiography and Life Writing
• Cyberculture and hypertexts
• Childhood and youth

• Postcolonial studies: colonial and post-colonial literature, culture and history

• Literatures of South Asia, South Asian diaspora, Black and Asian British writing; modern Arabic fiction (in translation)

• Culture and Identity: race, ethnicity, nationalism, multiculturalism

• Religion, modernity and secularism, especially modern Islam, fundamentalism, and the politics of the Middle East

• Theory: Marxism, postcolonialism, cultural studies

• Contemporary Fiction 1945-present in a world context
  

• Postcolonial writing, especially Nigeria
  

• Chinua Achebe
  

• Contemporary Women's Writing
  

• Literary approaches to Ageing

• Psychogeography: The psychological and political relationship between the built and the natural environment

• The impact of digital technology on cultural hegemont
  

• The future of the novel, its form and practise

• queer studies

• gender studies

• postcolonial studies (with an emphasis on gender, queer, and/or Africa)

• critical theory

• African or African-American studies

• comparative literature or translation (with an emphasis on gender or queer)

• diaspora/migration/border studies (with in an emphasis on gender or queer)

• 20th century/modernist/postmodernist literatures/cultures

• The Anglo-American post-war experimental novel, including Paul Abelman, Alan Burns, B.S. Johnson, James Jones, Ann Quin, Kurt Vonnegut, and their contemporaries

• 20th and 21st century Anglophone fiction

• social and cultural theories of narrative, particularly social narrative exchange, and narrative intersubjectivity

• philosophical, theoretical, critical, aesthetic and meta-realist (critical and radical realist) interpretations and analysis of culture

• social gerontology, ageing and public policy

• Early modern royal and civic festivals

• Geography and landscape in literature

• Literature and the sea

• Literature and the visual arts

• English poetry and theatre (1500-1700)

• Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

• Literature and Philosophy

• Contemporary Continental Philosophy: Agamben, Badiou, Deleuze, Nancy

• Indifference
  

• Victorian literature

• The novel

• Psychoanalysis and trauma studies

• Comparative literatures

• Addiction narratives 

Sean teaches in the Film and Television Studies programme and is presently the Deputy Head of the School of Arts. He graduated from Durham University with a degree in Modern History. He went on to complete an MA in American History at Bowling Green State University, Ohio and a PhD in American History at New York University. He has published extensively on the politics of cultural production in the United States, focusing in particular on trade unionism in the early twentieth-century American theatre and the regulation of actors’ labour in silent-era Hollywood. His monograph Weavers of Dreams, Unite!: Actors’ Unionism in Early Twentieth-Century America will be published by the University of Illinois Press in early 2013 to coincide with the centenary of the founding of the Actors’ Equity Association, the union that represents American stage actors. He co-edited (with Andrew Dawson of the University of Greenwich) Working in the Global Film and Television Industries: Creativity, Systems, Space, Patronage (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), an interdisciplinary collection of essays on the experience of working in film and television production which Professor Steven J. Ross of the University of Southern California described as ‘the most wide-reaching multinational study of its kind.’

He has recently shifted the focus of his research from the American entertainment industry to the British film and television industries. He is collaborating with Andrew Dawson and the BECTU History Project on a number of oral history initiatives and has just begun a project on working with celluloid which will document the experiences of technicians (cutting-room workers, lab workers, projectionists, etc.) whose working lives, prior to the advent of digital technologies, were defined by handling film.

Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger (Wallflower Press 2003) was the first English-language book-length academic study of Chinese martial arts cinema and its impact on global media, including the transnational stardom of Bruce Lee and Jet Li, the migration of Hong Kong film-making talent and aesthetics to Hollywood and the remediation of martial arts cinema through videogames and modern special effects technologies.  The book was translated into Chinese and reprinted by Peking University Press in 2011. East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film (co-edited with Leung Wing Fai, I.B. Tauris 2008) looks at the global impact of popular East Asian cinemas, and my own essay in the collection examines the way western filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Luc Besson have absorbed influences from Asian action genres.

The League of Gentlemen (BFI/Palgrave 2008) is a monograph in the BFI’s ‘TV Classics’ series. My current book Cult British TV Comedy (Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2013) expands my research into the cult/post-alternative TV comedy of the last twenty years and includes case studies of Vic Reeves and sitcom writer Graham Linehan as well as exploring ‘dark’ and ‘cringe’ comedy and looking at issues of taste and offence. Leon is also currently co-editing (with Sharon Lockyer and Milly Williamson) Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film and Television (I.B. Tauris forthcoming 2013.)

Alisa Lebow joined the Brunel School of Arts Screen Media department in April 2007. Prior to coming to Brunel she lived and taught in Bristol, Istanbul, and New York. Her theoretical work focuses on the margins and limits of documentary filmmaking. As both a scholar and a practitioner, Lebow is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, most recently from the British Academy and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.

She is the author of First Person Jewish (Visible Evidence Series, University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and numerous articles on various aspects of documentary. Lebow is the co-organizer of the annual London-based conference, Documentary Now! and has also organized Visible Evidence XVII in Istanbul, as well as a series of symposia on first person documentary from around the world. She is the editor of The Cinema of Me (Forthcoming, Wallflower Press).

She is also the co-editor of another volume, The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film, with Professor Alexandra Juhasz (Forthcoming, Blackwell Publications). She is a founding member of docIstanbul, an organization dedicated to advancing the cultural awareness and theoretical debates around documentary in Turkey and writes a monthly column on documentary for the Turkish film magazine, Altyazi. Lebow was a Visiting Fellow at the NYU Center for Media and Religion in Autumn 2005. Her documentaries have been aired on US television and have been screened in festivals and museums worldwide.

During his career, Julian has moved back and forth between working in the media and teaching about the media, and although he has been a full-time academic for the past twenty years he is still an active freelance journalist, and is a member of the editorial board of the British Journalism Review and of the advisory board of Index on Censorship. He is also chair of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, in which role he actively campaigns for a media which is both free from restrictions which stop it from performing its proper social functions but, equally importantly, behaves responsibly and displays the same degree of openness and public accountability which it habitually demands from other institutions. This work involves making numerous submissions to official enquiries of one kind or another, giving evidence to parliamentary bodies such as select committees, liaising with like-minded civil society groups, and maintaining a high media profile. All of this activity feeds directly into my teaching and research at Brunel. 

As an academic, practitioner and critical thinker I am particularly interested in the debates surrounding the theory/practice nexus. I am engaged in fostering discourse amongst practitioners, distributors and exhibitors and the university.

Main areas of interest (film): dissenting voices in world cinema, particularly those originating outside of dominant western hegemonies. Experimental film, the avant-garde, animation and cult film. Teaching practical courses or applied knowledge learning.

Main theoretical interests: semiotics, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, film history.

Academic attainment

• 2001-05: Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), School of Creative Arts (New Media), University of Melbourne (current)
  
  
• 1996: Bachelor of Arts (Honours)
  Department of Cinema Studies, La Trobe University
  
  
• 1991-94: Bachelor of Arts, La Trobe University
  
  
• 1993-94: University of California, Santa Cruz as part of the Education Abroad Program (EAP) exchange with La Trobe University

Michael has been an academic most of his working life. In part this is because studying film at the North London Polytechnic in the mid-1980s was a revelation to him in so far as it simultaneously provided not just an education in film but a political framework with which to understand the world around him. That connection between the study of a medium as a medium through which to learn about the world, remains central to his work as a teacher and researcher. 

Milly Williamson is Senior Lecturer in Film and TV Studies. She teaches and researches in the areas of horror, celebrity culture, gender, racism and the media, television studies and fan culture. Milly has a BA from the University of the West of England and a PhD from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of a book on the vampire cinema, has published widely on horror and is editing a collection on images of the undead with Leon Hunt. The main focus of her current work is the study of stardom and celebrity and she is at present completing a book on this topic. She has also been conducting research into the media representation of Islam and British Muslims and has published a number of articles on this topic. 

Malcolm provides tech support to the Screen Media subject area. He also designs and delivers various technical workshops for undergraduate and postgraduate students of the School of Arts.

Doug lectures in digital games theory and runs the School of Arts undergraduate games programmes. He has a BA (Hons) Degree in English from Oxford University (St Edmund Hall), an MA in Games Theory and Design and a PhD in Games Theory, both from Brunel. He has recently completed, and is now seeking to publish research into how the suspension of disbelief works in videogames.

A lifelong gamer, Doug has also worked in the games industry for Square-Enix / Eidos, credited on several titles. He chose to enter into academic research on games rather than continue a career in the industry because writing about games and trying to understand them more deeply had been a lifelong goal and interest.

Doug has had articles published in journals and written chapters of edited collections, often collaborating with Prof. Tanya Krzywinska since their research interests align. These interests include games and narrative, MMO and Online gaming structures and games' place as an exciting new artistic medium. All of this hinges around a passion for gaming as a new textual form, and its potential to work with the human imagination. Doug’s career development has matched games’ generally breaking out into the mainstream while simultaneously starting to be taken seriously as a media form by critics and academics. It is Doug’s desire to help this continue and take root, by showing students the importance of understanding games’ unique features and possibilities within the context of other media. Unlocking the storytelling potential of games as a medium is something he hopes his own research and the work of his students both in academia and the games industry will achieve in the future. He is always happy to field any questions or requests from current or potential students.

Tanya started playing computer-based games on 'Usenet' when working at the Digital Equipment Corporation while doing her Masters in film. Several years later, after completing her PhD and teaching film and media, she realised that there was very little academic writing about video games and decided to remedy that. She gave her earliest paper on horror games at one of the first ever academic conferences on games in 2000 and, soon after, edited with Geoff King the first collection of essays to be devoted to the study of the relationship between games and cinema.

Since then, she has focused her attention mainly on games, with a particular interest in their formal properties, graphical styles and ‘world creation'. She has, however, maintained her enthusiasm for the gothic and horror generally across various media. Tanya divides her time between Cornwall, where she lives in a Gothic monstrosity with bats in the belfry, and Brunel. She is also an author-illustrator and is currently working on a graphical novel.

Justin Parsler is a lecturer in game design and has earned a living designing and running games since he was sixteen, with a three year break from that two (nearly three) decade spree to take a Humanities Degree at Greenwich University. He completed a Masters Degree in Digital Games at Brunel the first year the programme was run and has been teaching the design portion of the course ever since.

As well as lecturing, Justin presently works part time as a consulting designer for Mediatonic, one of our industry partners working on a large variety of games.

Justin is currently undertaking a PhD at Brunel, in which he is assembling a taxonomy of agency (something he will talk about at length to anyone who does not run fast enough). In a comparatively fast time he has been published in various academic journals writing about a variety of topics.

Justin has a great deal of experience, both as designer and player, of almost every type of game there is and has very eclectic tastes - as long as it is a game.

Murray is Convenor and Admissions Tutor for Brunel's BA (Hons) in Journalism.

Murray is a freelance technology journalist, and a consultant to the news industry in; online search, SEO, social media, data journalism and Computer Assisted Reporting. He is also a member of the editorial board of Journalism Practice, a leading peer-reviewed journal in journalism studies.

Before coming to Brunel, Murray was Information Officer at The Centre for Investigative Journalism, and prior to this he spent five years as a trainer and researcher at the BBC.

He is a keen contributor to the media in his specialisms, having previously contributed to national and local media, trades press and bloggers.

Murray has a BA (Hons) degree in English from the University of York, and an MSc in Information Science from City University, London.

Jacquie Hughes’s career in journalism and programme production spans print, radio and television, and includes more than a decade at the BBC (latterly as a Commissioning Editor) and spells in the Independent Sector as Head of Factual Programmes at two of the country’s biggest indie producers. She has over 700 screen credits to her name, as reporter, producer/director, Executive Producer and Editor across all broadcast formats and genre including live, documentaries, investigative current affairs and drama-documentaries.

More recently, she has worked on strategy and standards at the BBC Trust, and authored various reports on the state of British media practice. She is a keynote speaker at many industry events, a visiting lecturer in Strasbourg and Bournemouth and sits on the social media action group of a number of civic institutions. She keeps her creative skills up to date by continuing to practice as a freelance Executive Producer.

Jacquie began her career in print, in the newsroom before shifting to radio and then television – specifically the BBC as a reporter/producer. A move into investigative current affairs led to a long stint as a Producer /Director on ITV’s flagship weekly programme World In Action. After many years in the independent sector making factual programmes for all UK and US channels, she moved back to the BBC to head up Documentaries and History, and then to Commissioner.

Her on-going interests include standards and ethics of practice, the role of regulation and the dynamics of the public/private sector landscape.

Paul Lashmar has been on the journalism staff at Brunel since 2009 and teaches a number of modules. He is currently undertaking a PhD on the links between the intelligence services and the media. Part of the research team in journalism and teaches on Brunel University's MA and BA journalism courses, Paul is writing a text book on multimedia journalism with Steve Hill of Solent University for publication by Sage in 2013.

Paul is a highly regarded investigative journalist and has worked in television, radio and print. He has been on the staff of The Observer, Granada Television’s World in Action current affairs series and The Independent. He has also produced a number of TV programmes for BBC’s Timewatch and Channel 4’s Dispatches series and is the author of three books and a chapter in ‘Investigative Journalism: Context & Theory’ (2008).

He covered the ‘War on Terror’ for the Independent on Sunday from 2001-2008.

He was awarded ‘Reporter of The Year’ in the 1986 UK Press Awards. Paul has written about terrorism, intelligence, organised crime, offshore crime, business fraud and the Cold War and has broken many major domestic and international stories. He is an adviser to the Centre for Investigative Journalism. His full CV can be found at www.paullashmar.com

Sarah Niblock is a journalist and author whose scholarly research covers the intra/interdisciplinary discourses associated with journalism studies, media and cultural studies, visual culture and communication technologies. She began her journalism career on the Birkenhead News, where she studied for her NCTJ proficiency certificate before moving to the Liverpool Echo. While on Merseyside she covered stories that still resonate today including families affected by the Hillsborough disaster and the disappearance and murder of the toddler James Bulger. Sarah then combined lecturing with freelancing news for the national press and writing regular features for Cosmopolitan and Company magazines. Her Masters degree and PhD are in visual culture, the latter focussing on psychoanalytical theory and gender. Sarah continues to combine journalism with academic life, writing and commentating on media issues. In 2008, she was asked to write questions for the House of Lords Select Committee on Media Ownership based on her research on radio news values. 

Rachel Sharp is an experienced newspaper editor, and an accomplished journalist, in print, online, and video.

She began her journalistic career as a trainee reporter working for her local newspaper. After passing her senior qualifications Rachel became a chief reporter for a large newsroom in London, where she won an award as video journalist of the year, before being promoted to editor of three regional newspapers.

In 2006 she was appointed as group editor of seven weekly titles across north London.

She was responsible for being the first editor to take her newspapers 'web first' recognising the importance of breaking news online, and was the first editor across her company to implement a social media strategy.

Rachel has excellent contacts within the industry, and has received awards for community journalism, newspaper of the year, campaign of the year, and newspaper design.

Rachel also works for the NCTJ as a trainer and assessor for the senior examinations, and works with a panel at the NCTJ to agree accreditation for Universities and Colleges across the country.

She has also worked closely with the Journalism Diversity Fund, selecting deserving applicants for journalism training.

Frank Griffith joined Brunel in 1997 and is Director of Performance. Born in Eugene, Oregon in 1959, Frank resided in NYC from 1980-1995 and performed with Ron Carter, Mel Torme and the Glenn Miller Orchestra. He also wrote arrangements for Lionel Hampton and the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

Frank has recorded three CDs for Hepjazz including The Suspect, featuring trumpeter, Tom Harrell(1990), The Frank Griffith Nonet, Live at the Ealing Jazz Festival, 2000 (2001) and Holland Park Non-Stop (2011) featuring the Frank Griffith Big Band. He also recorded The Coventry Suite(2003) featuring his nonet for the 33 Records label. He has also recorded with Sir John Dankworth and Dame Cleo Laine on Jazz Matters (2007 Qnote).

Moving to London in 1996, Frank has received commissions from the Ealing and Coventry Jazz Festivals, the Midlands Youth Jazz Orchestra as well as The Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School and Oakham School Big Bands. He is currently writing a commission for the Association for Music in International Schools (AMIS) Big Band. He has also arranged for Norma Winstone, Tina May, Tony Coe and Lee Konitz.

Sarah Kingdom-Nicolls is currently expanding her pianistic pursuits with the addition of live, interactive electronics, taking the already impressive grand piano into a larger scale sonic feast for the ears. Awarded an AHRC research grant, she is leading six collaborative partnerships and travelling the globe to meet experts in the field. Most recently she has been to Berlin, where she met a fellow pianistic creator, Andrea Neumann. Neumann has quite literally taken the inside of the piano out of its normal body and added microphones and numerous noise-making devices to create an entirely new but piano-related instrument. Sarah has also met up with Tod Machover from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Michel Waisviez from the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music in Amsterdam to discuss creating a new instrument with Sarah. Still in a consultation phase, this will combine all of the piano’s original innate characteristics, such as its vast natural resonating chamber and hyper-sensitive ‘action’ (hammers and keys) with electronically interactive technology.

For the current project, Sarah is preparing five newly-commissioned works which she will premiere in November at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and in London at the Cutting Edge Series (see www.sarahnicolls.com for more details) on November 29th. Each work explores different technological set ups, perhaps the most extreme being a piece where Sarah will wear sensors on her arms. This allows her to control through gesture the electronic manipulation of her own playing, thus creating the greatest level of synergy between natural pianism and computer processing. She has also worked with Brunel Research Professor Richard Barrett and together they have developed a new work which so deeply entwines piano sound with Barrett’s own electronic instrument (a midi keyboard in conjunction with extra controllers) that the resulting duo promises an almost unnervingly beautiful union of sounds known and new.

The contrast between the physicality of piano-playing and the cerebral world of computers is something which motivated Sarah to develop this project, specifically the desire to work with technology in an organic, natural and highly expressive way. To this end, a lot of her research has entailed looking at touch-sensitivity in midi controllers and how her pianism can be applied to these devices. Still a relatively new field – in terms of constantly developing technology – this has presented Professor Michael Clarke (from the University of Huddersfield) and the young composer Larry Goves (from the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester) with a challenging scenario. In each of these pieces, Sarah will trigger both pre-recorded sound files and live processing of her own sound. Finally, her research has also taken her into improvisational and almost theatrical considerations. For the former, she will present new work with harpist Ruth Wall, who also uses electronic processing to colour her sound. For the latter, expect electronic sounds to come out of the piano itself and to wonder how everything that you hear can come from only one pair of hands and an instrument so steeped in history as the acoustic grand piano.

Some comments from the Guardian 2003-2005

‘Sarah Nicolls brings a rare and radiant commitment to her focus on the contemporary repertoire.’

‘Nicolls’s performance seemed a model of clarity and accuracy. There was a certainty about every gesture, a cool precision even when the music was at its most explosive.’

‘Nicolls is a genuinely “edgy Brit”.

Jennifer Walshe is a composer, performer and visual artist of whom the Irish Times has said that "without a doubt, hers is the most original compositional voice to emerge in Ireland in the last 20 years”. She studied composition at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and at Northwestern University, Chicago, graduating with a doctoral degree in composition in 2002. A winner of the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, Germany in 2000, she returned to the Ferienkurse in July 2002 to lecture in composition. She was a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart between 2003 and 2004, and from 2004-05 she lived in Berlin as a guest of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm. In 2007 she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York and in 2008 received the Praetorius Music Prize for Composition by the Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur.

Jennifer Walshe also frequently performs as a vocalist, specialising in extended techniques, and many of her recent compositions use her voice in conjunction with other instruments. She is also active as an improviser, performing regularly with musicians in Europe and the USA. Her music has been performed and broadcast worldwide and she has received commissions from most of the major European new music festivals.

Perhaps her best known work to date is the opera XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! whose main characters are played by Barbie dolls. The opera was premiered in Dresden in 2003 and has received many further performances. More recent projects include Grúpat, a two-year project in which Walshe assumed nine different alter egos - all members of art collective Grúpat - and created compositions, installations, graphic scores, films, photography, sculptures and fashion under these alter egos.

Peter has been a regular conductor of the Composers' Ensemble, most recently at The Royal Academy of Art in a concert for artist Tom Phillips (2005) and in Dartington, Brighton, Bath, Oxford, Darmstadt, Salzburg and Holland. In the summer of 2002 he directed the Composers Ensemble in a Proms Portrait of Pierre Boulez in the presence of the composer.

Ensembles and orchestras Peter has worked with as a conductor since 2002 include the London Sinfonietta, Endymion Ensemble, Northern Sinfonia, Southbank Sinfonia. He has also conducted at home and internationally for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Joensuu Orchestra, Symphony Nova Scotia and Orchestra Camarata Labacensis, .

He is co-Artistic Director (with Colin Riley) of iF, a radical London Festival of new music and is Professor and Head of Music Research at Brunel University.

He led an extended project with bcmgmixing improvisation, realisation and composition.This culminated in the opening concert of their 2004-5 seasonInvisible Cities which received outstanding reviews.

Johannes Birringer joined Brunel University's School of Arts in early 2006. He is director of the DAP-Lab and Acting Director of the newly created Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance. He is a choreographer and media artist, and artistic director of AlienNation Co., a Houston-based multimedia ensemble that has collaborated on numerous site-specific and cross-cultural performance and installation projects since 1993. After directing international workshops on dance and technology in England, Germany, and the U.S., he was appointed head of the new dance and technology program at The Ohio State University (1999-2003) where he developed the new MFA curriculum in dance technologies and conducted research programs in his "Environments Lab." In 2003 he was appointed Principal Research Fellow in Live Art and Performance at Nottingham Trent University. In late 2005 he convened the Digital Cultures Lab, a cross-cultural dance and technology workshop-festiva, and in 2003 he founded the Interaktionslabor Goettelborn in a former Coal Mine in the Saarland, Germany. The Interaktionslabor is an annual international workshop dedicated to research, performance and software application development in interactive and networked media technologies.

His exhibition-performances and digital films have been staged in Europe, the U.S., Latin America, China and Japan. He has received numerous arts grants, awards, and fellowships for his work including a NEA/Rockefeller artists project grant in 1993. More recently, his directing projects included multi-media play Sueno, the interactive dance work Suna no Onna (London 2007-08), the digital oratorio Corpo, Carne e Espirito (Brasil 2008), and UKIYO [Moveable Worlds] (2009-2010), a choreographic installation created with artists from DAP-Lab and Tokyo/Japan.

Birringer received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Trier University (Germany) after graduate research fellowships at Cambridge and Yale Universities. He has taught performance studies at Yale University, UT-Dallas, Rice University, Northwestern University, and at the Giessen Institute of Applied Theatre Science.

Dr Broderick Chow is an artist-scholar with experience in numerous fields of the performing arts. He has been an actor, stand-up comedian, performer, writer, director and song-and-dance man. This wide-ranging approach has influenced both his research and teaching.

His work intersects with performance practice, political philosophy, and social theory. In 2010, Broderick became the first doctoral graduate of the Central School of Speech & Drama, University of London. His thesis, How to do things with jokes: relocating the political dimension of performance comedy examined his practice as a stand-up comedian in relation to larger questions of the validity of satire in the age of global capitalism.

Recent work includes an auto-ethnographic study of professional wrestling training. Broderick is currently at work on a monograph on performance, physical cultures, and precarious labour (see Research and Teaching).

Broderick is one half of Dangerologists, a male dance and physical theatre duo. Their piece Work Songs was developed with support in kind of the School of Arts (see More about Broderick).

Meretta trained as an actress at the School of Theatre, Manchester Polytechnic (now Manchester Metropolitan University). She went on to complete an MA in Drama Studies at the University of North London. Meretta has also undertaken training with Geese Theatre Company on Applied Drama Practice with offenders (Behind the Wall programme) and is a trained Mediator.

As an actress, Meretta worked in provincial theatre, community theatre, Theatre-in-Education, radio and TV for seven years before focusing on directing and teaching. She has directed, devised or performed in over 25 professional productions.

Royona has a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London (2011) on the British-Bangladeshi artist Akram Khan, an MA in Physical Theatre from Royal Holloway, University of London (2001) and a BA (Hons) in Theatre & Performance from the University of Plymouth (2000). She trained in classical and contemporary South Asian dance in India and specialised in physical theatre in the UK. Royona was the founding member and performer with Kinaetma Theatre, an intercultural physical theatre company that made work between India, UK and Portugal from 2002 to 2007.

Prior to joining the Theatre Department at Brunel, Royona was a full-time and permanent academic member of staff in the Drama Department at University of Wolverhampton where she was also the MA Drama Course Leader. She has also taught in the Theatre and Performance Department at the University of Plymouth.

Royona was elected as Secretary to join the Executive Committee for SCUDD (Standing Conference for University Drama Department). She is also a member of SDHS (Society of Dance History Scholars) and TaPRA (Theatre and Performance Research Association).

Ian Morgan graduated from Hull University with a BA in Drama and Kent with an MA (PaR) in Theatre. He trained as a performer at Monika Pagneux and Philipe Gaulier’s Studio in Paris; then went on to work with Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards for three years at their Workcenter in Italy. He has performed/devised with Teatro Pirequa at Théâtre du Soleil, ManAct, the Centre of Performance Research (CPR), Meredith Monk, Guillermo Gómez–Peña, Mkultra Performance Collective, Zecora Ura, Phillip Zarrilli and the Llanarth Group and Dan Canham’s Still House project. Since 2004 he has been a principal performer with the award winning Polish ensemble Song of the Goat.

Dr. Grant Tyler Peterson joined Brunel in 2013, having previously taught at Royal Holloway, University of London, University of Winchester, and Bath Spa University.  Grant is an emerging scholar and has published work on a diverse range of subjects including British alternative theatre history, dance, gender, sexuality, and digital research methodologies. 

Grant holds experience as a performer in theatre, musical theatre, television and commercials, and worked in numerous venues throughout Los Angeles and Southern California. He was trained at elite programmes including the Orange County School of the Arts and the Ray Bolger Musical Theatre Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

In addition to receiving a BA in theatre and musical theatre at UCLA, Grant earned an interdisciplinary Masters degree in experimental theatre and dance under the guidance of Sue-Ellen Case and David Gere.  After moving to Britain, he received Ph.D. funding from the Higher Education Funding Council of England (Overseas Research Students Awards Scheme) to study at Royal Holloway under the supervision of Professor Dan Rebellato and Dr. Chris Megson. This resulted in a project that examined British street theatre traditions and presented the first formal case study of one of England’s longest running – yet overlooked – street theatre troupes, the Natural Theatre Company.

Dani Ploeger is an artist and theorist, living and working in London and Berlin. Heralded in the press as the ‘Jimi Hendrix of the sphincter’, Dani’s performance installations often involve cheap readily available medical and consumer technologies and explore themes around the technologized body, sexuality and vanity.

His artwork has been featured in venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Basel, Experimental Intermedia in New York, para/site art space in Hong Kong and KipVis in Vlissingen, Netherlands. His writing in the field of digital art and cultural studies has been published in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media and the Body, Space and Technology Journal, among others. He is also a permanent contributor to The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (Oxford University Press).

Dani is a studio artist at ]performance s p a c e[ in London. After holding a position as Lecturer in Performing Arts at De Montfort University in Leicester, he was appointed as Lecturer in Theatre and Digital Arts at Brunel University London in 2012.

Photo: © John Connor Press Associates

Mary came to Brunel University in September 2001 and completed her PhD Resisting the Limits of the Performing Body (University of Warwick) the following year. She runs the Peer Assisted Learning Scheme (PALS) for Drama/Theatre students and provides ongoing support for our dedicated student team of PALS facilitators.

She also co-produces arts@artaud; the showcase platform for theatre, film, music, performance poetry, dance and multi-media presentations from across the School of Arts.

Gretchen Schiller is a choreographer who works in the field of media dance, videodance, participatory installations and movement environments. She has produced various projects in residency at the Banff Centre of the Arts (Camara ’96, Shifting Ground ’99, trajets ‘00 and the Raumspielpuzzle workshops ’03) and her works have toured in North America and Europe.

Gretchen Schiller received her BA from the University of Calgary, Canada in Dance and French Canadian studies followed by a MA from the UCLA, California, US in Choreography, and PhD from the University of Plymouth, UK in Interactive Arts. She directed the Diplôme Création Audiovisuelle Numérique for seven years at the Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier III, France and has taught workshops in Canada, Germany, England and France. She is the artistic director of Mo-vi-da, which supports the creative research in mediadance and interactive arts.

Stelarc is an Australian artist who has performed extensively in Japan, Europe and the USA - including new music, dance festivals and experimental theatre. He has used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality systems and the Internet to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body.

He has performed with a THIRD HAND, a VIRTUAL ARM, a VIRTUAL BODY and a STOMACH SCULPTURE. He has acoustically and visually probed the body- having amplified brainwaves, blood-flow and muscle signals and filmed the inside of his lungs, stomach and colon, approximately two metres of internal space. He has done twenty-five body SUSPENSIONS with insertions into the skin, in different positions and varying situations in remote locations.

For FRACTAL FLESH, as part of Telepolis, he developed a touch-screen interfaced Muscle Stimulation System, enabling remote access, actuation and choreography of the body. Performances such as PING BODY and PARASITE probe notions of telematic scaling and the engineering of external, extended and virtual nervous systems for the body using the Internet. Recently for Kampnagel, he completed EXOSKELETON- a pneumatically powered 6-legged walking machine actuated by arm gestures.

Current projects include the EXTRA EAR - a surgically constructed ear as an additional facial feature that coupled with a modem and a wearable computer will act as an internet antenna, able to hear RealAudio sounds. And MOVATAR is an intelligent avatar that will be able to perform in the real world by possessing a physical body. It will have a sound feedback loop from the body giving the virtual entity an ear in the world.

He has also completed an EXTENDED ARM - a manipulator with eleven degrees-of-freedom that extends his arm to primate proportions and a MOTION PROSTHESIS- an intelligent, compliant servo-mechanism that enables the performance of precise, repetitive and accelerated prompting or programming of the arms in real-time.

In 1995 Stelarc received a three year Fellowship from The Visual Arts/ Craft Board, The Australia Council. In 1997 he was appointed Honorary Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. He was Artist-In-Residence for Hamburg City in 1998. In 1999 he was appointed as a Senior Research Scholar for the Faculty of Art and Design at the Nottingham Trent University, and in 2003 became Principal Research Fellow in the Performance Arts Digital Research Unit at The Nottingham Trent University. In the spring of 2006 he was appointed Professor in the School of Arts at Brunel University.

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Fiona Templeton is an internationally recognised innovator in writing and directing for theatre and performance. She is currently Artistic Director and founder of The Relationship, a performance group based in both New York and London; and in the 70s was co-founder of the influential Theatre of Mistakes. Her large-scale site-specific work has won numerous international awards.

Her publications include plays, poetry and writing on the theory of performance. Fiona also collaborates with artists in other fields including visual arts, dance and music such as Elliott Sharp, Samita Sinha, Pamelia Kurstin, Molissa Fenley, Siobhan Liddell and Joan Jeanrenaud.

She has directed the work of innovative writers including Elfriede Jelinek (whom she has also translated), Michael Gottlieb, Suzan-Lori Parks and Leslie Scalapino.

Her work is shown at venues as varied as the Tate Britain, the Tramway in Glasgow, the Vortex in Dalston, ODC Theatre in San Francisco, the Puerto Rico International Festival of Theatre, Fort Jay on Governor’s Island in New York Harbor, the abandoned Pennsylvania Eastern State Penitentiary, and as commissions for Chashama Theatre and the Poetry Project in New York, and the Cultural Capital of Europe Festivals of Rotterdam and Lille. Collaborating organisations have included Amnesty International, French Railways, the Slovene Socialist Party headquarters, the offices of the European Union, a commercial accounting firm in the city of London, and a snackbar on Brick Lane.

She has received awards and fellowships including from the Rockefeller Foundation, the US National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has held a Senior Judith Wilson Fellowship in poetry and writing for performance at Cambridge.