The management of the Academy of Theatre and Dance is very proud to announce that our lector Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca has been appointed as special professor in Performance Philosophy in the department of Arts and Culture Studies, Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). 

The chair is located at the intersection of performing arts, philosophy, posthumanism, and artistic research and builds bridges between academic and practice-based research in the arts. The establishment of this new professorship provides a strong impetus to the development of performance philosophy as relatively young field which foregrounds the dual question of how performance thinks and how thinking is performed – paying particular attention to the often unequal value given to different ways of knowing. 

The professor by special appointment will focus on three themes: performance philosophy, the human/non-human relationship and social justice – with the aim to strengthen in the first place opportunities for knowledge exchange between students, teachers and other researchers of University of Amsterdam and the Academy of Theatre and Dance (ATD), Amsterdam University of the Arts. Besides that, partners like the Climate Imaginaries coalition, the Amsterdam Research Institute of the Arts and Sciences (ARIAS) and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) will be invited.

Building bridges
The tasks associated with the chair include developing collaborative research projects, shared teaching and the supervision of PhD students. Planned projects are particularly focussed on artistic research for climate justice and inventing formats and practices for how different knowledges can meet beyond the hierarchies and inequalities frequently repeated by institutional norms.  

The times we currently live in require a deepening and strengthening of a dialogue between science and the arts. The ATD management sees the chair as a crucial bridge to make this dialogue sustainable over the next years.

The chair begins in September 2024 for 5 years, running alongside and integrated with Laura’s ongoing work as Lector for the bachelor and master departments of the Academy of Theatre and Dance.
 

About Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca
Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca received her PhD in Drama from the University of Exeter. From 2016 to 2020, she was director of the Center for Performance Philosophy, part of the Guildford School of Acting, at the University of Surrey (UK). There she conducted research into the philosophical dimensions of theater and performance and the performativity of philosophy. She has published several books and articles on Performance Philosophy and has established herself as a leading researcher in theatre sciences, both in the UK and internationally. In 2020, Cull Ó Maoilearca was appointed Professor and head of DAS Graduate School at the Amsterdam University of the Arts.