‘Outside the Box’ is initiated by researchers at the University of Exeter, working with civic partners and artists. Evelyn O’Malley leads the research team. Cathy Turner and Tim Coles are co-investigators. Giselle Garcia joined us in March ’21 as postdoctoral researcher. We are working with Exeter culture and in consultation with Exeter City Council and the Devon Wildlife Trust. We will be working with a number of artists over the spring and summer 2021.
Dr Evelyn O’Malley
Evelyn works in the department of Drama. Her research interests are within the environmental humanities, and her work considers open-air performance forms, weathering as performance and climate in the theatre. Her monograph Weathering Shakespeare: Audiences and Open-Air Performance (2020) appears in Bloomsbury Academic’s Environmental Cultures series. She is also co-investigator on an AHRC-funded project, Atmospheric Theatre: Open-Air Performance and the Environment, led by Chloe Preedy, and co-investigator on the interdisciplinary NERC-funded Climate Stories, led by Peter Stott.
Prof Cathy Turner
Cathy is also based within the Department of Drama, and her work primarily considers theatre in relation to place and space. She recently led a research network on the politics of performance festivals in South India in collaboration with Anindya Sinha and Sharada Srinivasan at NIAS, Bengaluru. Other current research concerns gardens as spaces of performance. Her book, Dramaturgy and Architecture: Theatre, Utopia and the Built Environment was published by Palgrave in 2015. She is a core member of artists’ collective Wrights & Sites, making site-based work.
Prof Tim Coles
Tim Coles is Professor of Management in the University of Exeter Business School where he has led the successful tourism subject group for the last decade. His research examines how businesses and organisations in tourism, the cultural industries and creative economy respond to major challenges -such as digital innovation, austerity, Brexit, and global environmental change- in their management practices, operations and business models. Tim’s research has been extensively funded, in particular by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the European Union. He has completed projects for and with a wide range of partners from the public, private and voluntary sectors.
Dr Giselle Garcia
Giselle is a dramaturg specialising in contemporary Filipino theatre and performance in the Philippines and in diaspora. Her PhD at the department of Drama, funded by the College of Humanities International Studentship, contributes a dramaturgical method for interpreting performance through place and walking. Her research interests are new dramaturgies, translation, adaptation, walking, phenomenology, new play development, devising, and creative methodologies for response and criticism. She has taught in higher education in the Philippines and in the U.K. and previously worked in arts programming, management and advertising.
Exeter Culture
Exeter Culture brings together everyone who cares about arts and culture in the city. A small core team works hard to forge and nurture connections, initiate and facilitate conversations, and encourage and enable co-creation. Supported by a new collaboration between stakeholders University of Exeter, Exeter City Council, InExeter (the city’s business improvement district) and Exeter College, as well as funding from Arts Council England, Exeter Culture is here to improve the resilience and ambition of Exeter’s arts and cultural sector by creating new local, national and international connections that define the city’s future.
Outdoor Cultures 