Milija Gluhovic is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick and Director of the Erasmus Mundus MA in International Performance Research, an EU sponsored programme taught collaboratively by the University of Warwick, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Tampere (in collaboration with the University of Helsinki) and the University of Arts in Belgrade (from 2011). Milija joined the School in September of 2006. He holds a BA in English (Hons) from the University of Novi Sad, an MA in English from the University of British Columbia, and a PhD in Drama from the University of Toronto (2005).

 

 

Milija’s research interests include: contemporary European theatre and performance; memory studies and psychoanalysis; the politics of memory in Europe; discourses of European identity, migrations and human rights; religion and politics; cosmopolitanism and globalisation; the Eurovision Song Contest and the ‘New’ Europe; hip hop theatre; contemporary North American and North African theatre and performance.

 

He is currently completing a monograph, titled Performing European Memories: Trauma, Ethics, Politics which explores the intersections between contemporary European theatre, performance, and film and the interdisciplinary field of memory studies, and current preoccupations with the politics of memory in Europe. Asking whether a genuinely shared European memory is possible while addressing the dangers of a single homogenised European memory, the book examines the contradictions, specificities, continuities and discontinuities in the European shared and unshared pasts as represented in the works of Harold Pinter, Tadeusz Kantor, Heiner Müller, Andrzej Wajda, Artur Żmijewski and several other artists. Showing different ways in which these artists engage with the traumatic experiences of the Holocaust, the Stalinist Gulags, colonialism, and imperialism, the study argues that they challenge their audiences’ historical imagination and renew their affective engagement with Europe’s past. Embracing not only the past, but also the future, they open spaces for cultural convalescence to be achieved through the performance of mourning.

 

Milija is convening (with Karen Fricker, RHUL) an AHRC funded international, interdisciplinary research network titled “Eurovision Song Contest and the ‘New’ Europe,” which explores the ways in which the Contest has reflected, and perhaps driven, changing perceptions and realities of Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The project examines how the ESC, an annual popular song contest configured as a competition between European countries, has forged cultural interconnections that cut across political divisions between nations and shape the contours of a cosmopolitan European identity. The project involves three theme-based workshops: ‘European Margins and Multiple Modernities’ (at Royal Holloway, University of London, February 2011); ‘Queering Europe’ (at the University of Warwick’s teaching facility in Venice, Italy, April 2011); and the final workshop, ‘Feeling European: The Eurovision Song Contest and the European Public Sphere’ (at the Eurovision Song Contest in Düsseldorf, May 2011). The project will result in an edited collection Performing the ‘New’ Europe: Identities, Feelings, and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest (2012).

 

Milija is also working on his second monograph, which looks at a wide range of theatrical representations originating from different parts of Europe, which address the changing cultures of Europe in the post-1989 era and touch upon many pressing cultural and political concerns: Europe’s new sociocultural space, shaped and negotiated by the experiences of displacement, diaspora, exile as well as by the EU expansion; the complex issues of nationalism, fears about national security, borders and social justice as they pertain to the spectres of Eurocentrism; current debates in Europe concerning secularism, Republican ideals, Islam, and European identity; and cross-cultural collaborations between European artists. As part of this project, funded by a British Academy research grant, Milija conducted research in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey in 2007-2009. There he followed the Intercult’s Black/North SEAS project (http://www.seas.se/), a pan-European, interdisciplinary arts platform which brings together theatre, performance, and visual artists from two distinct European regions – the Black and North Seas countries.

 

 

Current Projects and research groups:

 

Performing European Memories: Trauma, Ethics, Politics. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2012.

 

Performing the ‘New’ Europe: Identities, Feelings, and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest. Eds. Karen Fricker and Milija Gluhovic. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2012.

 

 

Director, MAIPR (Masters in International Performance Research), an Erasmus Mundus program sponsored by the EU http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/theatre_s/postgraduate/maipr/

 

Research Collaboration between faculty members at Warwick and Boston Universities around the general theme of ‘Postcolonial Cosmopolitanisms.’

 

Research Collaboration between School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University , Delhi and the School of Theatre, Performance, and Cultural Policy Studies, University of Warwick http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/theatre_s/research/jnu/

 

Social Theory Centre, University of Warwick

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/rsw/research_centres/theory/staff/

 

Eurovision Research Network http://www.eurovisionresearch.net/2010/05/22/ern-inaugural-symposium-programme/

 

Arabic Theatre IFTR Working Group https://www.firt-iftr.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=39&Itemid=3&lang=en

 

 

Book Chapters 

 

“Cosmopolitanism.” Performance Studies: Key Words, Concepts, and Theories. Ed. Bryan Reynolds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2011.

 

“Tadeusz Kantor.” A New History of Polish Literature. Eds. Tamara Trojanowska, Joanna Nyzinska, Przemyslaw Czaplinski. Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2011.

 

“European Women on the Move: Gender, Migration and Belonging in Anne Lise Stenseth’s Kiss and Waste Project.” The Kiss and Waste Project. Ed. Morten Johan Svendsen. Førde: Sogn og Fjordane Museum of Fine Art, 2011. 70-85.

 

“Europeiske kvinner på reise: Kjønn, migrasjon og tilhøyrsle i Anne Lise Stenseths Kiss and Waste Project.” The Kiss and Waste Project. Ed. Morten Johan Svendsen. Trans. Kari Lyngstad. Førde: Sogn og Fjordane Kunstmuseum, 2011. 54-69.

 

“Marked by Loss: Mourning and Melancholia in Tadeusz Kantor’s I Shall Never Return.” Polish Culture: Private Encounters, Public Affairs. Eds. Tamara Trojanowska, Agnieszka Polakowska and Arthur Plackiewicz. Forthcoming 2011. 18 pp.

 

 

Journal Articles 

 

“Melanholicni gubitak u Krajoliku Harold Pintera” (“Melancholic Loss in Harold Pinter’s Landscape”). Sarajevske sveske/Sarajevo notebooks (2010): 265-284.

 

“Exhumations: The Return of the Dead in Tadeusz Kantor’s Let the Artists Die and Andrzej Wajda’s Katyń”. New Polish Perspectives 1.1 (2010): 227-255.

 

“Too Distant Shores: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Space of Exception.” Research in Drama Education 13:2 (2008): 147-158.

 

“The Mnemonics of Tadeusz Kantor’s Wielopole, Wielopole.” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 14 (2005). 23 pp.

 

 

 

“Rethinking Cosmopolitanism: The Black Sea Files.”

 

 

 

 

Awards and Research Grants (selection):

 

 

 

 

024 765 74773 (direct)
024 765 23020 (office)
024 765 23297 (fax)

 

F04a, Millburn House

 

Office Hours: Thursday 2-4pm (or by appointment)

 

MA in International Performance Research (course convenor)

Theatre of the ‘New’ Europe (3^rd year ug option)

3^rd year practical option and dissertation supervision

Hip Hop Theatre and Performance (1^st year ug core, spring term 2009)

Staging God, Man and History: Polish Drama and Theatre in Context (2^nd year ug option, autumn term 2007)

Introduction to Performance Studies (1^st year ug core, 2008/9, contributor)