Dr Swati Arora, BA, MA, PhD, FHEA

Profile

My work engages with minoritarian performance and visual culture, feminist theory, and postcolonial urbanisms. Across my research, writing and pedagogy, I am concerned with how different forms of performance and artistic production challenge colonial and imperial histories, epistemologies, and their corresponding debris.  

Prior to joining Queen Mary, I worked at King’s College London. This followed Mellon Fellowships at the Centre for Humanities Research and the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, UWC, South Africa, where I remain as a Research Fellow. I am a former co-convener of Performances in Public Spaces working group of the IFTR.  

Teaching

I tend to teach on the following modules: 

UG: 

• Power Plays 
• Culture, Power, Performance  
• Performance and Visual Culture in South Asia  
• Culture, Performance, Globalisation 
• Race and Racism in Performance 

PG: 

• Performance, Activism, Social Justice  

Research

Research Interests:

• Minoritarian performance and cultural production 
• Feminist theory 
• ‘race’, caste and performance  
• Black and Indigenous geographies  

Recent and On-Going Research

My current project looks at the relationship between visual art and performance practices and public spaces in postcolonial Delhi. It explores how these aesthetic practices emerge from, and respond to, the densely entangled processes of urbanisation, ecological crises, and sociopolitical environment, while navigating the dynamics of class, caste, gender, sexuality, and communal politics.  

I have ongoing research on gender, performance, and pedagogies of refusal. With colleagues at the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, UWC, South Africa, I am part of multiple interdisciplinary projects in this area. Some of this work has been published as ‘Performing Refusal’ in Injury and Intimacy (Manchester: MUP, 2022; Delhi: Zubaan, 2023; Cape Town: Karavan, 2023); ‘Disobedient Women and Theatre Historiography in India’ in The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre (2024); an edited book Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms: And Words Collide from a Place (2024); and ‘A manifesto to decentre theatre and performance studies’ (STP, 2021; The Performance Studies Reader 4th edition, 2025).  

I was awarded the Early Career Researcher Prize by the Theatre and Performance Research Association, UK and was shortlisted for the same in the QMUL Research and Innovation Awards.   

My research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation; UK-India Education and Research Initiative; European Commission’s Erasmus Mundus funding; German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD); Research England; Queen Mary Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, among others. 

Publications

Selected writing:

• ‘Disobedient Women and Theatre Historiography in India’, in The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre, ed. by Sean Metzger and Roberta Mock. London: Bloomsbury, 2024. Pp. 95-134. 
• Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms: And Words Collide from a Place, with Nina Lykke, Redi Koobak, Petra Bakos and Kharnita Mohamed (eds.). London and New York: Routledge, 2024.
• ‘Colliding Words and Worlds: Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms’, with Nina Lykke, Redi Koobak, Petra Bakos and Kharnita Mohamed, in Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms: And Words Collide from a Place, ed. by Nina Lykke et al. London and New York: Routledge, 2024. Pp. 1-25.    
• ‘Decolonisation, the University, and Transnational Solidarities’, with Redi Koobak and Nina Lykke, in Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms: And Words Collide from a Place, ed. by Nina Lykke et al. London and New York: Routledge, 2024. Pp. 287-301.  
• ‘Fugitive Aesthetics: Performing Refusal in Four Acts’, in Injury and Intimacy: In the Wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa, ed. by Nicky Falkoff, Shilpa Phadke and Srila Roy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022. Pp. 309-336. 
• ‘A Place Called Home’, Wasafiri (2022).   
• ‘A manifesto to decentre theatre and performance studies’, Studies in Theatre and Performance 41.1 (2021): 12-20.   
  Reprinted in The Performance Studies Reader 4th edition, ed. by Henry Bial and Sara Bady. London and New York: Routledge, 2025. 
• ‘Walk in India and South Africa: notes towards a decolonial and transnational feminist politics’, Translation and Performance in an Era of Global Asymmetries, South African Theatre Journal 33.1 (2020): 14-33.  
• ‘Walking at Midnight: Women and Danger on Delhi’s Streets’, Walking in/as Publics, Journal of Public Pedagogies 4 (2019): 172-176. 

Supervision

I welcome enquiries from potential doctoral students interested in any areas of my research. Current projects include racialisation and puppetry; Black feminist aesthetics; poetry and plantations in Kerala.