EDITORIAL BOARD
Subscribers are encouraged to send us proposals for guest and/or ongoing blogs.
We would be happy to feature your scholarly articles on diverse aspects of festival culture
on our blog platform. Interested, then, email us for more details.
Editor in Chief
Founder / Network Academic Volunteer
Dr. R. L. de Matas
Researcher and lead editor of the H-Labor-Arts and H-Caribbean networks. Her current research in Cultural Studies and Education focuses on the ‘sensory turn’ which she applies to festival culture and tradition. Interests include sensory autoethnography, sense phenomenology, community crafting and music, informal leisure, labour and working bodies, craftwork, Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora history and heritage.
Co-Editor
Network Academic Volunteer
Dr. Melanie-Marie Haywood
Birmingham City University, UK
Director of Education Development Service (EDS) at BCU, and has a passion for academic development, quality, and equity in education and leadership. She has worked across the field of education in primary, secondary and higher education, both in the Caribbean and the UK. Her research interests are comparative education studies, postcolonial education, assessment, and pedagogy. She is seeking to strengthen the links between education and festival culture.
Associate Editor
Network Academic Volunteer
Leah Holmes
Bath Spa University, UK
A postgraduate student specialising in the development and evolution of UK Anime Fandom. She
is an editor at Morley Community Magazine.
And is looking forward to developing the links between fan studies and festival culture.
Editorial Assistant
Network Academic Volunteer
Sophie Pengelly
Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK
A postgraduate student specialising in the Event Project Management. Sophie is a freelance copyeditor with experience in curating festival and social media features.
EDITORIAL BOARD
DR. KIRSTY FAIRCLOUGH
University of Salford, Manchester, UK
Associate Dean: Research and Innovation
in the School of Arts and Media. an international research career, Published widely on popular culture, latest publication can be found here.
PROF. DEBORAH KAPCHAN
Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. A Guggenheim fellow, she currently writing two books: The Aesthetics of Proximity and Between Morocco and France: The Festive Sacred and the
Islamic Sublime.
DR. KAREN DAVIES
Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK
Senior Lecturer in Tourism, Hospitality & Events department of Cardiff School of Management and sits on the Executive Committee of the Association of Events Management Education, and currently part of a research group on "Photography & Tourism".
PROF. CHARLES ARCODIA
Professor of Tourism, Sport and Hotel Management at Griffith University. Teaching areas are Risk Management in the Event & Tourism Industries, Event Evaluation & Impact Assessment. Published widely on tourism. events & management...
DR. MILLICENT WEBER
Australian National University, AU
Lecturer in English in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics. She researches how people engage with books and literary culture: from prizes and book reviews, to audience experience at literary festivals..
DR. NIAMH NICGHABHANN
Assistant Dean, Research for the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Limerick and the course director of the MA Festive Arts Programme at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick.
DR. MAARIT KINNUNEN
University of Lapland, Finland
Festival researcher at the University of Lapland and collected material from nearly 2,000 festival-goers from 17 festivals around Finland and based the visitors' descriptions on the overall festival experience model. Her focus areas are music festivals, festival audiences and their experiences.
DR. VIOLET CUFFY
University of Bedfordshire, UK
Lecturer in Tourism and Events Management,
working within higher education with special interest in principles of education and training. Her research interests include cultural events and festivals, carnival studies, diaspora, heritage and culture, community tourism, destination management Island tourism.
DR. JO-ANNE TULL
University of the West Indies, TT
Lecturer in the Carnival Studies Programme and Co-ordinator B.A. Carnival Studies, focusing on festival economics, carnival entrepreneurship and creative economy development in SIDS. Also interested in culture studies, creative industries, cultural tourism, policy and economy, and festival statistics....
DR. IVAN STACY
Beijing Normal University
Current research interests focuses
on complicity and the carnivalesque, primarily focusing on post-war fiction. He is an associate professor in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Beijing Normal University, China.
DR. GIULIA ROSSETTI
Oxford Brookes, UK
Rossetti is a Lecturer, her research investigates the relationship between cultural capital and literary festival attendance using two lines of inquiry. The research focuses on several core areas of literature, from Bourdieu’s cultural capital, to Peterson’s ideas about omnivourness and Négrier’s theory of festivalisation.
DR. EDUARDO RENCURRELL DIAZ
Instituto Superior de Arte.- (La Habana, Cuba), Facultad de medios audiovisulaes,
Faculty Member
A scholar and filmmaker with a PhD in Art Related Sciences specialising in film studies with a particular interest in dramaturgy and documentary film theory.
His academic work focuses on documentary storytelling and enunciative strategies for documentary film representation.
DR. MAICA GUGOLATI
She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology, with a specialization in Performance Studies and Visual Anthropology at INSTITUTE OF AFRICAN WORLDS, SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDIES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES (EHESS), PARIS. She is currently affiliated as a simple researcher at the same institution. She has a BA in Philosophy, from the University of Verona, Italy, and a MA in Social Anthropology and Ethnography at EHESS, Paris France.
https://imaf.cnrs.fr/spip.php?article4124&lang=fr, https://ehess.academia.edu/gugolatimaica.
DR. PRIYANKA BASU
Priyanka is the Curator for 'Two Centuries of Indian Print' project at the British Library. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL and a Visiting Scholar at the SOAS South Asia Institute. Her research interests include theatre, performance and film histories, book history, gender, and dance studies. Her monograph, 'The Cultural Politics of Folk: Perspectives from India and Bangladesh,' is forthcoming from London: Taylor & Francis, Routledge. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Book Reviews Editor of the 'Journal of South Asian History and Culture https://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff138969.php.
DR. HANNA KLIEN-THOMAS
Her research is situated in the field of media anthropology focusing on transnational media circuits, visual culture and digital activism. Her PhD project on Indian popular culture and Caribbean audiences which was funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, allowed her to spend a year as an affiliate scholar at the Institute of Gender and Development at the University of the West Indies. She published two monographs on Cuban Hip Hop and Hindi cinema as well as a number of book chapters and peer-reviewed articles.
DR. DEBORAH HICKLING GORDON
Dr. Deborah Hickling Gordon has been a cultural and creative industries practitioner, administrator and educator for over twenty years, working audio-visual production, the performing arts, advertising, public relations, arts management and policy development. Dr. Hickling Gordon is a lecturer in Cultural Studies in the Institute of Caribbean Studies (ICS), on the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies; where she is also the coordinator the Bachelor of Arts in Cultural and Creative Industries and the Bachelor of Arts in Entertainment and Cultural Enterprise Management.
DR. VIKRAM KAPOOR
Module Author and Online Tutor at the University of London. Vikram has a Ph.D. in Marketing and Management from the University of Limerick (Ireland), an Mphil degree in Business Administration and Management from Bocconi University (Italy), and an MCom degree from the University of Calcutta (India). He won the 2019 ACR-Sheth Doctoral Dissertation Award in the Public Purpose track and the 2021 AMS Review-Sheth Foundation Annual Doctoral Competition for Conceptual Articles. Vikram’s previous works have been published in Consumption Markets & Culture (Routledge, Taylor & Francis), and his research areas include consumer culture, arts therapy, rituals, and festivals.
DR. JARULA M. I. WEGNER
Dr. Wegner is an Adjunct Lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies at University of Frankfurt, Germany, and co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Memory Studies Group at the Frankfurt Humanities Research Centre. He holds degrees in Chinese (BA), German (MA) and English (PhD) with a doctoral thesis on “Transcultural Memory Constellations in Caribbean Carnivals: Literature and Performance as Critique.” His research interests include concepts of autobiography, memory, transculturality, postcoloniality, carnival, world literature, gender and critical theory.
DR. KAREN DAVIES
Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK
Senior Lecturer in Events Management in the School of Tourism, Hospitality & Events. Member of the Critical Event Studies research group, works closely with external organisations such as the British Arts Festival Association.
ADVISORY BOARD
DR. KIM JOHNSON
Partnership Supporter
Former Director of the Carnival Institute of Trinidad & Tobago
& Former Senior Research Fellow, University of Trinidad & Tobago.
Dr. Johnson is a researcher,
educator, journalist, filmmaker,
author, and historian.
PROF. HARRIET HAWKINS
Royal Holloway University, UK
Prof. Hawkin's research is focused
on the advancement of the geohumanities, a field that sits at
the intersection of geographical
scholarship with arts and humanities scholarship and practice.
DR. MARIA CHATZICHRISTODOULOU
London South Bank University, UK
Director of External Development and Enterprise, Head of Creative Industries. A cultural practitioner
who has worked as curator, producer, performer, writer and community organiser in the UK, Greece and internationally.
PROF. JANE ALI-KNIGHT
Edinburgh Napier University, UK
Professor in Festival & Event Management at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland and a Visiting Professor at Curtin University, Australia, leading and developing the festival and event subject group, facilitating training and development in the field, currently a board member of BAFA (British Arts and
Festivals Association).
PROF. KIRSTEN HOLMES
An internationally-recognised
expert in the study of volunteering, particularly in events, leisure, sport and tourism contexts. She also has expertise in developing sustainable events and festivals and is the lead author of the Routledge textbook Events and sustainability (2015).
She has taught at universities in Australia and the UK, conducted research projects across 15 countries and published over 60 peer reviewed papers in leading journals.
DR. REBECCA FINKEL
Dr Finkel is an urban cultural geographer and Reader in Events Management in the School of Arts, Social Sciences & Management at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. Her main field of study focuses on identity, social justice, and critical events studies. Main research interests include strategic analysis of government socio-economic policies for funding and development with regard to creative industries and social capital.
PROF. LEON WAINWRIGHT
Professor of Art History at The Open University. His research brings together the politics of art historiography with the philosophy of aesthetics, and new approaches to materiality and geographical space in the social sciences. In particular, he has worked to redefine the intellectual scope of art history as a discipline, with reference to the Caribbean, South Asia and diaspora communities in Europe and North America. He has also demonstrated how his scholarship may interact more creatively with art practice, museum and exhibition curating, arts organising, cultural policy, and the public understanding of art.
PRACTITIONER CONSULTANT
PAX NINDI
Former Senior Member Arts
Council (1996 - 2006)
Pax Nindi is Chief Executive and founder of the Global Carnivalz, National Advisor for Arts Council of England, South Africa Arts, Sports and Culture, Arts Council of Wales and Ireland. As a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and an international carnival consultant, Pax is a keen advocate for the carnival artform and lectures as well as speak at conferences around the world.
RHONDA ALLEN
Sheffield Carnival Director
Director of Sheffield Carnival, qualified carnival judge, and a cultural practitioner
who has worked as a designer, performer, and community organiser with years of experience in the field, working both in Trinidad and Tobago and the UK.