About Us
This project was created in collaboration with the Performance and Migration International Research Group, the Performance, Migration and Nationalism CATR/ACRT Working Group (2024-2026) and International Federation for Theatre Research Working Groups.
The group was conceived as a result of the publication of the Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Migration (2023) co-edited by Yana Meerzon and Steve Wilmer, which included articles by 60 contributors. The first meeting of the group took place in 2023 online, and since then, we have held meetings online and in person, as well as participated in the CATR and the IFTR annual meetings.
This group holds the aim to bring together specialists in theatre and performance studies, as well as in philosophy, history, politics, religious studies, literary and language studies, to study the impact of global migration on social, cultural and theatre performance and to critique and dismantle practices of nation-building.
Our objective is to propose new philosophical and cultural discourses that can help us understand the role of performance arts in building a more just democratic community of mobile subjects based on peoples’ shared interests and responsibilities, and recognizing the worth of different opinions, values, and positions.
The group’s specific goals include: 1) to contribute to the internationally growing field of interdisciplinary studies in migration and performance; 2) to develop new interdisciplinary methodological and theoretical approaches for the study of migration through and in theatre; 3) to re-evaluate and re-validate the impact humanities and social sciences can have on the public sphere and discourses.
In addition, Yana Meerzon and Steve Wilmer co-edit Palgrave Studies in Performance and Migration; and the group is now working on a new publication on practices and dramaturgies of migration for the journal Critical Stages to appear in December 2026.
Who are we?
The co-conveners of the Performance and Migration International Research Group are Yana Meerzon (University of Ottawa), Sheetala Bhat (York University) and Stephen Elliot Wilmer (University College Dublin).
The research and website building was carried out by our team of Globalink Research Interns who travelled from different countries to Ottawa, Canada to work for Professor Yana Meerzon at the University of Ottawa on funding administered by Mitacs between July and October 2024, and summer 2025. Their roles included: identifying and completing literature reviews on plays, productions and secondary academic literature in this subject area; creating a terms and concept guide of specific terminologies with definitions; building this website on which to access their research findings; and making a note of their research methodologies and processes to share with fellow researchers and students.
We are also grateful to Ann Hemingway (librarian at the University of Ottawa) for her consultation on our project.
The website has been designed and developed by Misha Kostrov, an MA candidate at the University of Ottawa, Department of Theatre.
Below is further information on each contributor of the project.
Yana Meerzon (Co-convener)
Yana Meerzon is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of four books, including Performing Exile – Performing Self : Drama, Theatre, Film (Palgrave 2012) and most recently Performing Nationalism in Russia (Cambridge UPress, 2024). She co-edited nine collections of articles, including Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture with David Dean and Daniel McNeil (Palgrave 2020) and Handbook on Theatre and Migration with Steve Wilmer (Palgrave 2023). Former President of Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR), she is now a co-editor of the book series Palgrave Studies in Performance and Migration. uOttawa profile: https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/view/profile/members/270
Sheetala Bhat (Co-convener)
Sheetala Bhat is a theatre researcher, artist, and playwright. She specializes in South Asian theatre and politics, South Asian diasporic theatre in Canada, and Indigenous theatre in Canada. Her articles have been published in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Research in Canada, and the Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts. She is the author of Performing Self, Performing Gender: Reading the Lives of Women Performers in Colonial India.
Sheetala is working on two book projects: a comparative study of cultural performances of love as anti-colonial resistance in India and in Indigenous theatre in Canada, and a new project on the interconnections between settler colonialism and performances of Hindu nationalism in Canada.
She is currently the co-convenor of the Performance and Migration working group at the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR), and at the Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR).
YorkU profile: https://profiles.laps.yorku.ca/profiles/bsheetal/
Steve E. Wilmer (Co-convener)
Steve E. Wilmer is Professor Emeritus at Trinity College Dublin, where he was Head of the School of Drama, Film, and Music. He has served on the executive committees of the American Society for Theatre Research and the International Federation of Theatre Research, and as a visiting professor at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley, and as a research fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has also taught in doctoral summer programmes for many years at the University of Helsinki and the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
He co-edited a special topic on ‘Theatre and Statelessness in Europe’ for Critical Stages in 2016. Recent books are Performing Statelessness in Europe (Palgrave, 2018), Deleuze, Guattari and the Art of Multiplicity (2020), Life in the Posthuman Condition (2023), and The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Migration which he co-edited with Yana Meerzon in 2023. He is co-editing a book series with Yana Meerzon for Palgrave Macmillan on “Performance and Migration”.
TCD profile: https://www.tcd.ie/creativearts/people/emeritus-staff/swilmer/
Isma Shahid (Research Intern)
My name is Isma Shahid and I am currently a fourth year undergraduate student from the United Kingdom studying BA Modern Languages and Cultures (Spanish and Italian) at the University of Durham. The aspect that drew me the most to this project was the opportunity to explore the nexus between migration and neo-nationalism, in particular, the role of theatre and performance arts at the fore-front of cultural resistance and mediation throughout history and until present-day.LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/isma-shahid
Juan José Mondragón (Research Intern)
My name is Juan José Mondragón and I am currently finishing my degree in Literature at Universidad del Valle (Colombia) with a research-creation thesis focused on playwriting. As an artist, writer and researcher from the Global South, I have always been interested in theatre, literature, and the arts as mediums for expressing the human conditions that exist on the margins of our contemporary world, particularly the urgent phenomenon of global migration. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juan-josé-mondragón-a46581228/
Kateryna Krasina (Research Intern)
My name is Kateryna Krasina, and at the beginning of the project I was finishing my bachelor’s degree studies in Ivan Franko Lviv National University, Ukraine. My major – International Relations – is closely linked with studying migration and neo-nationalism as realities of the modern world. That’s why I got highly interested in the project – to see how can migrants manifest themselves and tell their stories – in this case, through art. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kateryna-krasina