EDITORIAL BOARD
Should you wish to join our editorial board or learn more about our work contact festival.culture.edu@gmail.com.
Editor in Chief
Founder / Design and Creative Direction / Network Academic Volunteer
Dr R. L. de Matas
Her ongoing 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.
Associate Editor
Network Academic Volunteer
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.
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.
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 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 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 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 PRIYANKA BASU
Priyanka is a Lecturer in Performing Arts at the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King's College London. She was the Curator for 'Two Centuries of the Indian Print' project at the British Library. 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.
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
Lecturer in Marketing at Goldsmiths, 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 the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Consumption Markets & Culture, and Marketing Intelligence & Planning. 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 EMILY RUTH ALLEN
Dr. Allen, is a musicologist, her doctoral research focused on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Carnival brass bands in Mobile, Alabama. She is also an active clarinet, crumhorn, and Renaissance recorder player, performing regularly throughout the Tallahassee area.
PROF LISA GABBERT
Prof. Gabbert specializes in Folklore Studies. Her research interests include landscape and place; festivals, monsters and play; and humor and folklore in medical contexts. She is former Director of the Folklore Program (2013-2019); served on the Executive Board of the American Folklore Society (2011- 2013); and was a visiting Professor at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto (2015).
DR ANJU BENIWAL
Dr. Beniwal gained her Ph.D. in Sociology and Masters in Anthropology and Sociology. Presently, serving as Assistant Professor of Sociology at Govt. Meera Girls College, Udaipur, Rajasthan - India. Her area of interest is Leisure Studies, Women issues and Tribal studies.
DR SARAH FEINSTEIN
Dr. Feinstein is a Teaching Fellow at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds, and the Programme Leader for the MA in Audience Engagement and Participation. She previously, worked as a Lecturer in Museology at the Institute of Cultural Practices at the University of Manchester.
She has worked in the cultural sector for over seventeen years, acquiring skills in collections management and arts administration. Dr. Feinstein worked as a museum technician at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), and as research assistant for the Repatriation Office at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (Washington, D.C.).
DR ANDREW MARTIN
Andrew R. Martin, Ph.D., is Professor of Music at Inver Hills College, St. Paul, Minnesota where he teaches courses in music history, music analysis, percussion, and directs the African music ensemble and steelband. Martin’s research explores globalization, Caribbean music and mobilities, tourism, American music, and exotica. His research has appeared in several print and digital journals, newspapers, blogs, and in reference works such as the Grove Dictionary of American Music. He is the author of the books Steelpan Ambassadors: The US Navy Steel Band 1957-1999 and Steelpan in Education: A History of the Northern Illinois University Steelband.
PROF AMY LEE
Prof Lee has a background in comparative literary studies and Buddhist studies, and has published in a range of topics including feminine autobiographies, witchcraft and witchery, experiences of solitude, teenage literature of magic, marginalized experiences by female writers, and popular film and fiction. Recent research projects include using Playback Theatre to cultivate self-understanding, self-care, and building connection among diverse groups of participants. She has been an associate professor at the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. She is now a professor at the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Hong Kong Metropolitan University.
DR MANDY CURTIS
Dr. Curtis overall interests are in outdoor public events and festivals. This has culminated in measuring attitidudinal change in participants of a community festivals (with Dr Adam Jones, 2024), the use of haptic technology in music events (forthcoming - with Adrian Bossey, Falmouth and Dr Adam Jones, Brighton), making outdoor dance festivals accessible for tourism (2022, and an industry sector review of outdoor dance and includes research into Journeys Festival of Dance. I have recently researched outdoor dance as an approach to engage new and wider events audiences (2020). I am interested in events that take place in public spaces and how barriers to all artforms can be reduced. In valuing diversity in all its forms, I am passionate about making events accessible.
DR JONATHAN SKINNER
Dr. Skinner is a Senior Fellow member of the Higher Education Academy with a particular teaching interest in interviewing skills and qualitative research methods. He has undertaken fieldwork in the Eastern Caribbean on the island of Montserrat (carnival and festival tourism and trauma, colonial relations and disaster recovery) and in the US/UK (social dancing, arts health, contested heritage and St Patrick's Day). He recently applied his work on festivals and carnival to support sustainable lobster fishing practices in Sainte Luce, Madagascar (2019). He previously lectured at the University of Abertay Dundee (1996-2003), Queen's University Belfast (2003-2013) and the University of Roehampton (2013-2021).
DR ADÉỌLÁ DEWIS
Dr. Dewis originally from Trinidad and Tobago, explores expressions of identity and belonging through the visual and performance aesthetics of Carnival/mas', masquerade and folk rituals. Her practice encompasses drawing, painting, performance art, spoken word and writing. Adéọlá is also Founder of Laku Neg (Black Yard), an artist-run company that promotes the exchange of African diaspora and indigenous knowledge through conversations, articles and events that engage philosophy, heritage, arts and living culture.
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.
PROF MARIA CHATZICHRISTODOULOU
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.
ADVISORY AND 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, MSC, BA
Former director of the Sheffield Carnival
After working in carnivals in various capacities for many years, Rhonda developed a special interest in the judging of carnival costumes, their traditions, practices, and contemporary perspectives. Both Trinidad and Tobago and the UK are home to her research focused on carnival aesthetics, performance, and judging.
LINETT KAMALA, MA, NPQH, FHEA
Lin Kam Art Founding Director
Linett Kamala is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and carnivalist
with extensive experience working with organisations across a
broad range of sectors. Her specialisms are dramaturgy, sound
system culture, large-scale festival logistics, carnivals of the African
diaspora, and sonic dynamics in mass gatherings. Linett is Board Director for the Notting Hill Carnival, and an Associate Lecturer in MA Performance: Design and Practice at the University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins. She also serves as an editorial board member on the FCRE network.
RUBADIRI VICTOR
A multi-media artist is the founder of the Artists’ Coalition of Trinidad & Tobago and founder and Artistic Director of the ‘Wire Bend Folklore Theatre’. A multi-media artist from Trinidad & Tobago working in 8 mediums (painting, theatre, music, film, photography, carnival arts, writing & publishing, design & curation, and lecturing). He has an extensive catalogue of work in all of these media spanning 20+ years. His multi-media work and multiple apprenticeships with Elder Master Artists informed his art and activism, and has led him to become a scholar with new critical takes on contemporary cultural theory.
He is also an author of ‘Meditation on the Traditions’- a photo-essay on Trinidad Carnival's traditional masquerade - and publisher of ‘Generation Lion Magazine’.- the largest glossy magazine in the Caribbean.
SHAUN RAMBARAN
Photographer Shaun Rambaran devoted his life to Trinbagonian history and culture, moving away from a fifteen-year career in commercial work to photograph Trinbago Mas, Carnival, stick-walking, Moko Jumbie, and Trinbagonian street life. As a photographer, one of his best memories is shooting 'Mariella, Shadow of Consciousness' during the 2019 Carnival Queen Preliminaries. He provides a photographic archive of Trinbagonian culture, architecture, and street life @method_moda.
CATHERINE SFORZA
The love of photography started with her father when she was 8 years old. She got into the cultural arts through Carnival in 2017. She was the road manager for Moko Somokow (an award-winning Moko Jumbie band) in 2019 and 2020. These experiences inspired her to venture into Project Management and continue with her passion for art. She is passionate about preserving and documenting Trinidad’s stories.
She has been doing so through 1000mokos, the Alice Yard Lost and Found project and her collaborations with Method Moda. Don’t be surprised if you see her walking on stilts through the streets of Port-of-Spain some morning.
JOAQUIN BARATA
As of 2016. he has been based in Phnom Penh. Cambodia. Having a passion for culture and traditions, he has explored
very remote areas around the world,
being particularly interested in portraying human diversity.
PAST EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBER(S)
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.
Gone too soon, passed away December 2021.