Dr Joshua Abrams

SB, SB, MA, PhD, PGCTLHE, SFHEA
Job title
Interim Dean of School / Director of Learning and Teaching
Portrait of Dr Joshua Abrams
Orcid ID
0000-0002-2833-8949
Institutional Repository

Profile

While I don’t seek comparison with Eugene O’Neill or Danjuro X, I too was born into the theatre. My first onstage appearance was in utero, and I was showing off (or rather shown off) to colleagues of my parents on the New York State Theatre stage on my way home from the hospital immediately after being born. My earliest professional credit was age 3 as Trouble in Madama Butterfly and the only trouble from then was keeping me off the stage.

I left the theatre behind to attend MIT for university, although I ended up with dual degrees in Management Science and Theatre, and I did professional directing and design work in the Boston area. After university, I worked on Wall Street as an economic consultant, until being drawn back to an MA in theatre at Brown University and a PhD at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. My PhD focused on ethical philosophy and contemporary American theatre and performance, across vectors of identity politics, and I continued to work and publish on that in post-PhD jobs at the Universities of Hull and Roehampton, which brought me to the UK.

My current work combines my love for theatre with my passion for food and food culture(s). I publish and speak widely in this area, including recent keynotes at the Culinary Institute of America and Performance Studies international conference. I received an AHRC CreativeWorks Fellowship for my “Decade Dinners” project and funding through the Being Human Festival for a symposium titled “Memory Banquet: Food and Acts of Remembering” in 2014.

Alongside my research, I seek to provide service to and curate within the discipline. I am President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). I was Conference Co-Organiser for the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) 2016 annual conference and previously served as Vice President for Conference for ATHE, as well as co-founding the ATHE Performance Studies Focus Group Preconference, which has been running since 2003. I am a member of the AHRC Peer Review College, review applications for the HEA and serve on editorial boards for four journals.

Areas of Expertise

  • Food and Performance
  • Contemporary/Experimental Performance
  • Ethics and/of Performance
  • Performance and Philosophy
  • Theatre and Religion/Jewishness
  • Identity Politics and Performance
  • American Theatre
  • Solo Performance
  • Performance and Politics

PhD Supervision

To date, I have supervised 6 PhD thesis to completion and externally examined 4 more in areas including memory and performance, religion and theatre and identity politics. I am currently supervising or interested in supervising doctoral projects in the areas of food and performance, identity politics and experimental performance.

Key Publications

2022. “Sriracha and the Performance of Identity” Fonds of Food: Sauces and Identity in the Western World, ed. Andrew Donnelly, Beth Forrest and Deirdre Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

2021. ‘On Theatre in Plague Times: State of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’, Theatre Topics, 31.1, 1-4. DOI: 10.1353/tt.2021.0003

2021. ‘Dear Young Chef’ in Lessons from Lockdown: Cooking after Covid. (Galway, Ireland: A Food on the Edge Book).

2020. ‘On “Seeing” Theatre in 2020: Blindness at the Donmar Warehouse” ’Co-Authored with Jennifer Parker-Starbuck PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art,  43.1, 78-82, DOI: 10.1162/pajj_a_00548

2020. “Presidential Address to the 2019 ATHE Conference.” Theatre Topics, 30:1, 11-15, DOI: 10.1353/tt.2020.0005

2020.  “Towards an Ecological Dramaturgy of Dining: Landscape as a Plating Device and Sustainability” Contemporary Theatre Review 30.4, 490-508, DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2020.1820497

2017. “Gloss: Esprit de Corps”; “On Scale”; “Gloss: Realism”; “Th’eater” in Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage, ed. Daniel Sack (Abingdon: Routledge), pp. 75, 156, 183, 200-201.

2017. “Trumping Taste: On the Gustatory and the Rise of the Post-Factual” Performance Research, 22.7, 153-161, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2017.1353221

2017. “Menu Dégustation – We insist the entire table participates: An introduction to On Taste”, Performance Research, On Taste 22:7, 1-5, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2017.1353240

2017. “On Oysters” in sketch, Mourad Mazouz and Pierre Gagnaire, (Bloomsbury Press)

2015. “Design and Décor of Restaurants” in Sage Encyclopedia of Food Issues, edited by Ken Albala (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.)

2013. “Performing the Ephemeral: On Ice Cream and the Theatre”, Performance Research, On Ice, 18.6, 112-121, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2013.908065

2013. “Mise en Plate: The Scenographic Imagination and the Contemporary Restaurant”, Performance Research, On Scenography, 18.3, 7-14, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2013.816464

2013. “Affective Presents/Effective Presence: Intensity, Futurity, and the Theatrical Politics of the Child” Performance, Identity and the Neo-Political Subject, edited by Matthew Causey and Fintan Walsh (Abingdon: Routledge), pp. 201-214,

Register of Interest

President, Association for Theatre in Higher Education