Keynote Speakers 2015
Keynote Speakers
NSU proudly presents this year’s keynote speakers for the summer session.
Ben Highmore, professor of Cultural Studies (Media and Film, Centre for Material Digital Culture) at University of Sussex, and Roberta Mock, professor of Performance Studies and Director of Doctoral Training Centre in the Arts & Humanities at Plymouth University.
Ben Highmore
Born in Bristol in 1961 Ben Highmore studied fine art in the mid-1980s before completing an MA in the Social History of Art at the University of Leeds in 1990. He started teaching cultural studies in various universities from 1991. He completed his doctoral studies at Birkbeck College, University of London in 2000 under the supervision of Steven Connor. The thesis, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, became the basis for his first book (published by Routledge under the same name) which was released in 2001. At the same time he published an anthology of texts, artworks and film scripts by a range of different people that were identified as involved in a heterogeneous tradition of ‘everyday life studies’ (The Everyday Life Reader, Routledge).
In 2005 he published the book Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City (Palgrave Macmillan). This was a study of urban culture through attention to the rhythms and velocities of city life as they were articulated in films, novels, photographs, paintings and in city planning. In 2006 Continuum (now Bloomsbury) published his Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture, a study of the maverick historian and theorist who wrote books on mystic possessions, the philosophy of history, and everyday life. The book-length study of de Certeau was an attempt to provide a sustained methodological and theoretical foundation for the discipline of cultural studies. Or more precisely it was an attempt to provide a set of insistent opportunities that emerge from poststructuralist critiques of epistemology for the non-discipline of cultural studies.
In 2009 Palgrave Macmillan published A Passion for Cultural Studies. Using the Enlightenment meaning of the ‘passions’ to refer to those energies that are usually referred to now as affects, moods, feelings and emotions, this book directed cultural studies to passion as its overarching subject. His book Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday (Routledge 2011) developed this as part of a general approach to culture based around ‘social aesthetics’ which would include all the various passions as well as the senses, attention and perception. This work is being continued in forthcoming publications on cultural feelings and moods.
His 2008 anthology The Design Culture Reader was part of a project to direct social aesthetics at the material orchestrations of life that can loosely be defined as design. This work was continued in the book The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House (2014) and is ongoing in various projects around taste, architecture and design. His study of the visual culture of brutalism (titled Out of Ruins: the Visual Culture of Brutalism in 1950s Britain) is finished and awaiting publication. In 2014 he was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a book on the making of taste that will look at changes in domestic taste in the 1960s, 70s and 80s in Britain and Europe and the emergence of a class and a culture identified as the ‘radical centre’.
Roberta Mock
Roberta Mock was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada in 1966. The location of this city, on an international border, one mile from Detroit, continues to inspire and haunt the themes, motifs and subject matter of much of her thinking and creative practice. Roberta moved permanently to the UK in1985. She completed her BA, focusing on 20th century French Drama, at East London Polytechnic. Her MA specialisms at the Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds, were lighting design and new circus. Roberta’s doctoral project, entitled “Performing the Jewess: The Representation of Gender, Race, Class and Sexuality by Jewish Women”, was completed at the University of Exeter. Tracing a diasporic performance tradition from Rachel Félix and Sarah Bernhardt in 19th Century France to Roseanne Barr and Sandra Bernhard in late 20th Century America, her thesis eventually developed into the monograph, Jewish Women on Stage, Film and Television, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2007.
Roberta has edited a range of collaborative publications including Performing Processes: Creating Live Performance (2000); Walking, Writing and Performance: Autobiographical Texts by Deirdre Heddon, Carl Lavery & Phil Smith (2009); Performance, Embodiment & Cultural Memory (with Colin Counsell, 2009); and a special issue on Zombies & Performance for the journal, Studies in Theatre & Performance (with Lee Miller and Phil Smith, 2014). Between 2002 and 2013, she edited Intellect Book’s Playtext Series of plays and theatre writing. Roberta’s writing tends to focus on the body, gender and sexuality, particularly as it relates to live art and comic performance by women. It has been published in journals including Feminist Review, New Theatre Quarterly, Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research and Women & Performance.
Roberta has worked at Plymouth University since 1993 and was appointed its first Professor of Performance Studies in 2009. Committed to the recognition and valuing of practice-as-research methodologies, the first half of her inaugural professorial lecture was performed as her alter-ego, Bobbie the Elf. Prior to making solo performances, Roberta directed and performed with Lusty Juventus Physical Theatre, a company she co-founded with Ruth Way and Chris Hall. Between 1996 and 2004, the company made four productions which toured in the UK and to venues in Russia, Greece and Brazil. Her most recent project, Heaven is a Place (2014) is a dance-film inspired by the work of Jean Genet and made with members of Plymouth’s LGBT communities, as part of an EU Culture project.
With a long-standing commitment to the development and training of new researchers, Roberta runs the research masters programme in Theatre & Performance and is the Director of the Doctoral Training Centre in the Arts & Humanities at Plymouth University. Roberta is also Co-Director of the 3D3 Centre for Doctoral Training, an Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded consortium which focuses on practice-led research in digital art, design and performance.