Hadeel is a critical-theatre scholar and historian of SWANA countries. Her intellectual interest is theatre development as a mode of governance in Iraq. She worked as a senior research fellow and lecturer at Monash University, the University of Melbourne and the University of Baghdad. She has published in the Journal of Intercultural Studies and the Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World. As a fellow at gd:c, Hadeel will be working on her monograph, which examines how the confluence of global and transregional intellectual and artistic thought combined with state-building projects to form the glocal, Iraqi theatre-maker-citizen.  

Developing Theatre in Iraq: the (un)making of glocal Iraqi theatre makers Cultural Governance in Iraq from Al-Nahda to Neoliberal Age

Developing Theatre in Iraq outlines an innovative, empirically informed and theoretically driven conceptual model: the provisional glocal Iraqi theatre-maker-subject. This model captures the transnational history of Iraqi theatre, which has been determined by three major political and economic discourses: global and regional intellectual movements since the late-19th century, oil wealth since the early 20th century, and the creative economy since 2003. Grounded in governmentality theory, the book examines how the rise and fall of the glocal theatre-maker embodies the dispersed values of theatre in the educational and cultural policies designed to govern Iraq.

Toby is an associate professor at Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s national academy of sciences. He specialises in Mediterranean history and studies northwest Africa in European cartography. He authored Family and Empire: The Fernández de Córdoba and the Spanish Realm and has co-edited three collections of essays. Liang has (co-)founded the Spain-North Africa Project, The Medieval Globe, and other academic organisations. He has lived in Taiwan, Syria, Spain and the USA.  

Where was Northwest Africa in the Age of Exploration?

Northwest Africa is absent in scholarship on the Age of Exploration. My project restores the area’s role as an intermediary between Europe, the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. By analysing maps and texts from the 14th to 18th centuries, I am investigating how conceptualizations of northwest Africa were dis:connective. The phenomenon of blank space, adjacent to absence, silence and erasure, looms large, and I am developing a methodology to understand blanks, particularly how they shaped epistemological developments in European encounters with the world and ‘Others’.