English and Creative Arts experts

Associate Professor Jenny de Reuck

Connecting theatre and young people

An expert in Shakespeare and Elizabethan performance art, Associate Professor Jenny de Reuck runs the Children's Theatre unit at Murdoch University.

She writes and directs a new play for primary school children each year, several of which have been published as e-books and are used by teachers across Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Associate Professor de Reuck is currently working on her next e-book, which combines the performance of her most recent play, The Captive Carousel (2008), with commentary and images to help bring theatre into a contemporary context for young people.

Professor Vijay Mishra

Diasporas; multicultural theories; books on cinema and Salman Rushdie

Vijay Mishra is Professor of English Literature and Director of the Krishna Somers Foundation for the study of diasporas at Murdoch University.

Author of more than 60 refereed articles and book chapters, Professor Mishra has won two Large ARC (Australian Research  Council) discovery grants, and writes the annual survey of multicultural theory for the Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory.

He is currently working on a book on cinema and another on Salman Rushdie.

Professor Mishra's publications include Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind with Bob Hodge, The Gothic Sublime, Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire, and The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary.

Dr Serge Tampalini

New media in performance art: integrating virtual environments and alternative technologies

Dr Tampalini researches the use of mobile technologies as a teaching method in performance art, and the use of the language of theatre in game design.

His new media interests involve using the Second Life virtual environment as a teaching tool as well as a virtual space for art exhibitions and theatre performances.

Dr Tampalini has also produced a diverse body of theatre for audiences across Australia, Canada, Morocco and Malta.

Dr Helena Grehan

Performance theory, spectatorship, ethics and performance, interculturalism, race and representation.

Dr Helena Grehan is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Arts, specialising in the study of performance art, particularly the ways politically-inflected works impact, or have potential to impact, on spectators.

Dr Grehan has written on a range of international performance and installation works that deal with provocative social and political issues.

She is currently working on a series of articles about ethics, ambivalence and the question of judgement.

Dr Grehan's publications include: Mapping Cultural Identity in Contemporary Australian Performance, and Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age.