Central Welcomes Dr Broderick Chow

Central is delighted to welcome Dr Broderick Chow as its new Deputy Director of Learning and Teaching.

Originally from Vancouver, Canada, Dr Chow came to London in 2005 to study at Central on the MA in Advanced Theatre Practice, following which he undertook a research degree.  In 2010, Dr Chow became the first person to graduate from Central with a PhD.

Previously, he has worked at the University of East London and Brunel University.  He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York and is a regular visiting researcher at the H. J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports, University of Texas at Austin.

Dr Chow’s research concerns questions of theatricality, performance and the sporting body.  From 2016-2018 he was Principal Investigator on the AHRC funded research project Dynamic Tensions: New Masculinities in the Performance of Fitness, a cultural history of men’s fitness and its intersection with the theatre in Britain and the United States.  This research resulted in a Practice Research performance, articles in Performance Research and TDR: The Drama Review, and a forthcoming monograph with the University of Texas Press.  He is co-editor of Performance and Professional Wrestling (Routledge, 2016) and is co-editing a new collection entitled Sports Plays with his long-time collaborator Eero Laine.  In addition to research on masculinities, physical culture and sport, he is also engaged in research on Philippine commercial theatre and popular music, reading these performances through a dialectic of coloniality and post-colonial self-affirmation.

As a teacher, he has extensive experience teaching musical theatre, acting and performance writing, as well as research-led modules that integrate theatre and performance theory with methodologies of ethnography and Practice Research.  He is committed to practicing equality, inclusion, anti-racism and social justice at every level of the institution, and is looking forward to bringing his experience working on such questions at departmental and college level at Brunel to Central’s suite of specialist programmes and diverse student body.