Dr Swati Arora, BA, MA, PhD, FHEA

Profile

My work engages with minoritarian performance and visual culture, transnational feminisms, 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 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships in Visual History and Theory at the Centre for Humanities Research and then at the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, UWC, South Africa, where I remain as a Research Fellow. I am a recipient of Akademie Schloss Solitude fellowship (2025-26) and Early Career Researcher Prize (TaPRA, 2024).    

I co-convened the Performance and Public Spaces working group at International Federation for Theatre Research (2019-21) and was part of the Theatre and Performance Research Association’s executive committee as Co-Research Officer (2022-24). 

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 
• Transnational feminisms   
• ‘race’, caste and performance  
• Postcolonial urbanisms   

Recent and ongoing research:  

My current project engages with the intersections of coloniality, geography, and racialisation as read through aesthetic practices, archival traces, nonhuman creatures, and embodied experiences in postcolonial Delhi. It explores how performance and visual arts contend with 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); co-edited book Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms: And Words Collide from a Place (2023), and ‘A manifesto to decentre theatre and performance studies’ (STP, 2021; The Performance Studies Reader 4th edition, 2025).  

My research has been enabled by fellowships and grants from the UK-India Education and Research Initiative; French National Research Agency (ANR); Mellon Foundation; German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD); Research England; Queen Mary Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences; among others.   

Publications

Selected writing:

• ‘A manifesto to decentre theatre and performance studies’, in The Performance Studies Reader 4th edition, ed. by Henry Bial and Sara Bady. London and New York: Routledge, 2025. 

• ‘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, 2023.   

• ‘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, 2023. 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, 2023. 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. [winner of Early Career Researcher Prize, TaPRA]   

• ‘Walk in India and South Africa: notes towards a decolonial and transnational feminist politics’, Translation and Performance in an Era of Global Asymmetries, ed. by Sara Matchett and Mark Fleishan, South African Theatre Journal 33.1 (2020): 14-33.  

• ‘Walking at Midnight: Women and Danger on Delhi’s Streets’, Walking in/as Publics, ed. by WalkingLab, 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; caste, plantations and poetry in Kerala.