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About this talk

Dr Morosetti's current project ‘The Making of African Theatre: Academics, Playwrights, and Theatre Practitioners at the University of Ibadan, 1952-1970’ (funded by BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant) investigates how 'African Theatre' as practice and a field of scholarship was facilitated by the creation, in 1962, of the School of Drama at Ibadan. As the university became independent from that of London, of which it had been until then a college, the creation of the School of Drama, and its subsequent transformation into the Department of Theatre Arts paved the way for the study of the subject in West Africa. Situating in the global South a model for challenging teaching and pedagogical practices in the North, the project investigates the legacy of Ibadan asking what lessons can be learnt from that example that may help us address the current crisis of theatre humanities in the UK, and in general how we approach the study and teaching of African theatre in contemporary HE. The project builds on extensive archival research that includes material in the Archives of the University of London, the Martin Banham Collections at Leeds, the Higher Education in Anglophone Tropical Africa archive at Oxford, the Royal Commonwealth Society Library at Cambridge, the archives of African Studies at Ibadan, and especially the underexplored material of the University Archives at Ibadan. As the project will eventually culminate into a monograph, Dr Morosetti would be keen to hear from colleagues and students on ways in which the project could be developed further. The paper will therefore present my findings and then invite feedback from the audience, including on similar examples from other contexts in Africa. Dr Tiziana Morosetti is a Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Research Associate with the African Studies Centre, Oxford. She works primarily on Nigerian theatre and performance, and on representations of race on the 19th-century and contemporary stage. She is the editor of Africa on the Contemporary London Stage (2018) and, with Osita Okagbue, the Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race (2021), and is currently co-editing with Lynette Goddard the Cambridge History of Black British Theatre and Performance (forthcoming 2027). She serves on the board of the African Theatre Association (AfTA) and is a collaborator on the project ‘Classics at the Crossroads: Partnership, Mobility, and Exchange Between Ghana, Nigeria, and Canada’ (Memorial University, 2023-26). She is also the co-founder and deputy director of the journal Quaderni del ’900. Part of the African Studies Centre Seminar Series convened by Prof Rita Abrahamsen and Dr Gabrielle Robbins.

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