Dr Swati Arora, BA, MA, PhD, FHEA

Profile

My work engages with the intersections of performance and visual culture, feminist theory, Black Studies, and dramaturgies of urban space in the global South. 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.  

Teaching

I tend to teach on the following modules:

• Power Plays
• Culture, Power, Performance
• Performance and Visual Culture in South Asia
• Culture, Performance, Globalisation
• Performance, Activism, Social Justice

 

Research

Research Interests:

• Minoritarian performance and cultural production
• Feminist theory
• Postcolonial urbanisms
• 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 religiosity.  

With colleagues at the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, UWC, South Africa, I am part of ongoing interdisciplinary projects on gender, performance, and pedagogies of refusal. Some of this work has been published as an essay on ‘Performing Refusal’ in Injury and Intimacy (Manchester: MUP, 2022; Delhi: Zubaan, 2023; Cape Town: Karavan, 2023) and as ‘A manifesto to decentre theatre and performance studies’ (STP, 2021; The Performance Studies Reader 4th edition, 2025).  

I co-edited Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms: And Words Collide from a Place (2024) with Nina Lykke, Redi Koobak, Petra Bakos, and Kharnita Mohamed. The central focus of the book is methodological―it explores how an engagement with pluriversal, transnational, intersectional, and decolonial feminisms can stimulate epistemic and disciplinary border-crossings. Through creative and critical approaches, the writing explores themes like friendship, ongoing communion with the dead, transversal relations, embodied storytelling, and ethics of planetary sustainability. Supported by the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT), this volume is the result of a collaboration with Linköping University, University of Bergen, Central European University, and the University of the Western Cape.    

I was awarded the Early Career Researcher Prize 2024 by 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, particularly from communities that are under-represented in academia.

Current students:

• Prerana Kumar, ‘Ritual Fracture: Dismantling Patriarchal Hierarchies through Queer, Anti-caste, Ecofeminist Ritual Poetics’ — with Nisha Ramayya and Rehana Ahmed (LAHP funding). 

• Jordan/Martin Hell, ‘Black Deviations, Archival Speculations: Black Feminist Practice-led Research in 20th Century Literature and Performance’ — with Nisha Ramayya (QMPS funding). 

• Tobi Poster-Su, ‘Towards a Critical Puppetry: Racialisation and Material Performance’ — with Nicholas Ridout and Martin O’Brien (LAHP funding).