Performance Research Hub: participatory event grants

The Hub provides an arena for researchers and practitioners with shared interests within this field to come together to discuss the theory of performance and to cross-fertilise ideas and practice across a wide range of academic disciplines and communities. This programme of events links directly with the initiatives of the Performance Research Hub, enabling external artists and partners to work with academics to co-create, collaborate and share their research and work in new ways and with new and wider audiences.

Apply via IRAMS. Deadline 10am, Monday 16 June 2025 (8th week).

Made possible by the van Houten Fund.

Submit an event for consideration

This is an incubation space to develop and promote new collaborations, to provide an insight into the work of Oxford University researchers, and to support the work of researchers.

The lead applicant must be an academic based in the Humanities Division. Either more than one University department/Faculty must be involved, or an external artist must be involved. We welcome applications from researchers at any career stage (DPhil students, Early Career Researchers, research staff (whether college or department), as well as postholders). 

All types of events are considered including seminars, workshops, performances, screenings and conversations. They must have a clear link to your research at the University of Oxford. We are looking to support events that bring researchers together in a multi-disciplinary space, participatory research with artists, creatives etc, that experiment and have the potential to lead to further collaborations. 

Funding is available of up to £500 per event. This can be used for items such as: 

• Refreshments/catering 

• Screening licenses 

• Travel for speakers 

• Artist fees

We also welcome applications for events which do not need funding, but which would benefit from association with the Performance Research Hub. 

Decisions on events will be made by the Performance Research Hub steering committee.

To submit an event for consideration, please use IRAMS. If you have any questions, please email performance@humanities.ox.ac.uk. Click the link below to download the 'case for support' template, which must be submitted via IRAMS:

Case for support - Performance Research Hub events

Case for support - Performance Research Hub events  

Previous successful applications

The fund opened in MT 2024, and the successful projects were:

Ibsen-Kieler Translation Workshop
Lead applicant: Professor Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (English)
A workshop on the new translations by Gaye Kynoch of Ibsen’s plays A Doll’s House and When We Dead Awaken and Laura Kieler’s play Men of Honour, to be published by OUP in their Worlds Classics series in November 2025. Men of Honour has never before been available in English, so this volume will not only make it available to Anglophone readers and audiences for the first time but will also show how it brilliantly interacts with the two Ibsen plays. Kieler was the inadvertent model for Nora in A Doll’s House, and had complex, ongoing interactions with Ibsen over several decades and, most intriguingly, through these three plays in which they speak to one another. The workshop will be exploring and testing the speakability, rhythm, pace, and tone of the translations, a key step toward publication.

Happy Baby
Lead applicant: Jasmine Johnson (doctoral student, Ruskin School of Art)
Jasmine Johnson’s new screenplay, Happy Baby, will be performed as a live reading at Modern Art Oxford MAO Lates, with a live score from artist/musician Vivienne Griffin. The screenplay dramatizes Johnson’s personal attempts to conceive a child queerly. The screenplay follows a Hollywood-style cinematic arc in three acts with the protagonist’s increasing alienation and disconnection from their body as a medical site and the associated feelings of disembodiment, oscillating cycles of grief and hope. Events such as insemination, scans, tests, and conversations with friends – brainstorming new names for themselves as gender-fluid parents or discussing what constitutes good sperm – intertwine with discussions about the intergenerational transmission of ideas. What begins as a critique of discrimination and UK fertility inequality evolves into a stark reality, a story of attempted conception turns into an absurd Kafkaesque tragicomedy featuring a protagonist named JJ repeatedly slipping through the cracks.

Journal of Embodied Research: A Study Day
Lead applicant: Ben Spatz (visiting scholar, Ruskin School of Art)
Co-applicants: Dr Paola Esposito (Anthropology)
Journal of Embodied Research (JER, https://jer.openlibhums.org/) is an innovative open access journal that exclusively publishes video articles. This one-day symposium will be the first in-person gathering of the journal’s extended community, bringing together artist-scholars and practitioner-researchers to share and discuss the questions opened by the journal’s unique combination of videographic form and titular theme of embodiment. JER will be used as a starting point for broader discussions of videographic scholarship practice across disciplines.

Plot Holes – 3 Acts
Lead applicant: Frank Wasser (doctoral student, Ruskin School of Art)
Co-applicants: Kelly Lloyd (doctoral student, Ruskin School of Art) and Professor Daria Martin (Ruskin School of Art)
Three short lecture-performances by artists and academics Frank Wasser, Adam Gallagher, and Kelly Lloyd. These performances will examine how class has historically been mediated and understood within the University of Oxford and contemporary art-making. Participants are invited to respond to Fors Clavigera – 3 Potholes, an exhibition by Frank Wasser at Fusion Arts, which questions John Ruskin’s call for empathy with the working class through his 1874 initiative to repair the Hinksey Road. This event will explore class histories through performance-based responses without seeking to resolve these tensions, but rather considering how class issues can be expressed through the body. Plot Holes – 3 Acts will offer a unique, thought-provoking exploration of how class, labour, and art intersect, engaging participants in a critical reflection on both historical and contemporary social issues.

The White Whale
Lead applicant: Professor Christine Gerrard (English)
Co-applicants: John Terry, Director, The Theatre, Chipping Norton
This application supports a collaboration between TORCH/Oxford researchers and The Theatre, Chipping Norton, to create a new stage version of Melville’s Moby Dick. This version moves away from the ‘sea yarn’ conventions of previous productions and will lean into the text’s radical experimentalism with multiple forms and voices. It will give due weight to Melville’s unprecedented polyvocal representation of a shipboard community of subaltern voices – queer, black, marginalized, enslaved – as a counterweight to monovocal charismatic authoritarian command. This adaptation will resonate powerfully with current political and societal concerns.  Two R & D events are planned in Oxford to integrate the academic community into the play’s development. The first is a half day of developments rehearsals, with Gerrard and other Oxford colleagues offering ideas and input. The second is a half day for an open rehearsal and discussion session with audiences held at St Luke’s chapel, open to students and the public. 

What’s in a letter: Queer Temporalities
Lead applicant: Jen DeNike (doctoral student, Ruskin School of Art)
Co-applicant: Giulia Astesani, artist
A performative lecture and conversation to collaboratively think through an (inherently queer!) epistolary form. DeNike and Astesani’s intervention evolves from utilizing autobiographical and auto-fictional methods of writing, overlapping lived experiences, critical theory, and historical research (with a focus on queer and feminist history). These tactics will allow an embodied and affective reading of the past but also for less stable approaches to history translated into a performative voice and action. The script for the performative lecture will emerge from a letter exchange between DeNike and Astesani. Both the content of the letters and the performative delivery will engage with the notion of the 'chorus', investigating forms of non-hierarchical citations and polyvocality in the writing and the performance itself. Throughout the live intervention, DeNike and Astesani will ultimately trouble notions of authorship and expand tactics of ‘live address’.

For more information please visit: https://torch.ox.ac.uk/performance-research-hub-participatory-event-grants