Meet our new teaching staff: Mojisola Adebayo, Zara Dinnen, Patrick Flanery, Ella Finer, Charlotta Salmi and David Schalwyk

We are delighted to welcome our new teaching staff starting this semester!

We asked them for a quick introduction to their work and expertise, feast on the results below…

Mojisola Adebayo – Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance

I’m a London born performer, playwright, director, producer, facilitator and teacher. I specialise in Theatre of the Oppressed and hold an MA in Physical Theatre. I have worked internationally in theatre, television and radio for over twenty-five years, from Antarctica to Zimbabwe. My work has ranged from being an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company to co-founding VIDYA, a slum-dweller’s theatre company in Ahmedabad, India.

My theatre productions include Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey (Lyric Hammersmith), Muhammad Ali and Me (Ovalhouse) and I Stand Corrected (Artscape, Cape Town). Publications include Mojisola Adebayo: Plays One (Oberon), 48 Minutes for Palestine in Theatre in Pieces (Methuen) and the co-written Theatre for Development Handbook (Pan). My (QMUL) PhD thesis is entitled Afriquia Theatre: Creating Black Queer Ubuntu Through Performance.

I am currently compiling Plays Two and working on her next production, STARS, a play, installation and club night with community based intergenerational workshops with women and girls that explores sex and space travel, orgasm and outer space, the pleasure and power of female sexuality. I am looking forward to working creatively and critically with QMUL to reflect and include the multiple identities of London, in every way. See www.mojisolaadebayo.com for more.

 

Zara Dinnen – Lecturer in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature

I’m joining QMUL having spent four years lecturing at University of Birmingham. Whilst I was there I was working with great colleagues to develop our teaching and research into contemporary literature and culture, and I’m excited to do more of that work here at QMUL with new great colleagues. My own research is about digital media. I am interested in how literature and popular culture tell stories of everyday life lived with new technologies, and how those stories shape the ways we live our digital lives. I write about literature, film, TV, comics, and teach with these different media too. At QMUL I am looking forward to term starting, to new teaching and new spaces and new people.

I am currently watching: all of Netflix.

I am currently reading: Paper Girls vol.3 and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels

 

Patrick Flanery – Professor of Creative Writing

In the past five years, I have published three novels, the most recent of which, I Am No One, appeared in 2016. I grew up in the U.S., in California and Nebraska and New York, but have lived in the U.K. for the past sixteen years, having come to do a masters and doctorate in English at Oxford. My first degree, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film and Television Production, was from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Before joining Queen Mary, I spent three years as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Reading and several years before that I was a Research Associate at the University of Sheffield, where I taught Contemporary and Modern Literature and Literary Theory.

At QM, I look forward to building the SED’s Creative Writing pathway into a rich and varied programme that will give students wide latitude to experiment with different kinds of writing over the course of their degree. The guiding principle for the pathway will be to foster a space in which experimentation is valued, and engagement with the world around us—in Mile End, in the East End, in London, in Britain, in Europe more broadly—is celebrated.

 

Ella Finer – Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance

I’m looking forward to being a part of this extraordinary department and school for the next year: collaborating on, discussing and sharing research, as well as teaching on modules I wish I had taken as an undergraduate. I was an undergraduate myself in Glasgow, where I also did an MPhil researching the gendering of photographic space, resulting in turning a theatre into a camera obscura, a camera and a dark room in succession. I moved back to London to study at Roehampton for a PhD researching materialities of the female voice in performance.

I make work with sound and have installed/performed this work in galleries (including Bloomberg Space, Raven Row, Focal Point, Ikon, Baltic 39) and as part of symposia of my own and others making. My interest in archival practices and “caring for the continuous” has resulted in an event curated for the upcoming British Library’s Season of Sound. Selector Responder: Sounding out the Archives will take place on December 8th with speakers including David Toop, Larry Archiampong, Holly Pester and Nina Power. I look forward to meeting more of you in classrooms and corridors and all best wishes for the new year.

 

Charlotta Salmi – Lecturer in English

I’m the new lecturer in Postcolonial and Global Literature. I’ve just finished a 3 year British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Birmingham, working on violence, advocacy and protest in graphic narratives from around the globe.

In addition to my work on comics, I am finishing a book on borders and conflict in literature from partition areas.

Before starting my postdoc I held a temporary lectureship at QM and I’m delighted to be back in the department!

 

David Schalwyk – Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Director of the Centre for Global Shakespeare at QMUL

I am Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Director of the Centre for Global Shakespeare at QMUL.  I was formerly Academic Director of Global Shakespeare at QMUL and the University of Warwick.  Director of Research at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. and editor of the Shakespeare Quarterly, and  before that Professor of English and Deputy Dean at the university of Cape Town. I have published some 150 essays and chapters in books, and my monographs include Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge, 2002), Literature and the Touch of the Real (Delaware, 2004), Shakespeare, Love and Service (Cambridge, 2008), Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare (Arden Shakespeare, 2013), The Word Against the World: The Bakhtin Circle (Skene, 2016). My latest monograph, Shakespeare, Love and Language is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2017.  My translation of Karel Schoeman’s Afrikaans novel, ‘n Ander Land (Another Country) will be published in a new edition in 2018.

I am interested in Shakespeare’s afterlives across the world, love and service in Shakespeare, and literary theory and philosophy, especially the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Stanley Cavell and the theory and history of emotion.  I also have an interest in South African prison writing.

Since I have been at Queen Mary for three years already, having moved into SED this year from Global Shakespeare, I’m looking forward to working in the strong academic and research community that constitutes SED and working with a range of students.

 

 

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All Things SED Editor

I am the Web and Marketing Administrator in the School of English and Drama. Amongst my various roles, I run the School's website (www.sed.qmul.ac.uk) and its Twitter feed (@QMULsed). I also manage the running of the School's Open Days and draft promotional materials.