David Calder

I am Senior Lecturer in Theatre & Performance Studies in the Department of Drama & Film. In my current work, I am interested in how artists working in European public spaces engage their audiences with debates surrounding democracy, rights, citizenship, and sovereignty, and how the terms of such debates come to be embodied and felt in performance.

My research explores the aesthetics, politics, and ethics of performance in public space, with a particular focus on Europe.

Recent research publications have received honourable mention for the Outstanding Article Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and honourable mention for the Oscar G. Brockett Essay Prize of the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR).

With Dr. Sam Čermák (Edinburgh College of Art) and Dr. Fraser Stevens (University of Saskatchewan), I co-convene the Performance in Public Spaces Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR).

Prior to joining the University of Manchester in 2014, I earned my B.A. in French from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and completed my Ph.D., titled “Visible Machinery: Street Theatre and Industrial Space in Contemporary France,” at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. I conducted fieldwork for my doctorate as a Fulbright Fellow in France.

I am also a writer of plays and creative nonfiction and an alumnus of the Royal Court Writers' Group (2026) led by Nina Segal. My plays have been shortlisted for the Theatre503 International Playwriting Award, a top-10 finalist for the ATG Playwright’s Prize in association with Platform Presents, and longlisted for the RSC 37 Plays Project and the Papatango Prize. My creative nonfiction has won the QuietManDave Prize and been published in Epoch.

My current book project, Public Performance, investigates how performances in public space contribute to the imagination and contestation of a transnational European public sphere. I also ask how performances in public space might become performances of public space as part of the necessary infrastructure of democracy.

This project has emerged from my earlier work on French street theatre. In my first book, Street theatre and the production of postindustrial space: Working memories (published 2019), I analysed contemporary French street theatre companies' involvement in urban and regional redevelopment projects in order to discover how street theatre makes sense of urban and economic change. My goal was to show how theatrical events and performative acts make changes in the nature of work manageable and spatial transformations navigable. Thanks to funding from the University of Manchester, this book is available Open Access here.

I welcome proposals from prospective Ph.D. students in any of the following areas: performance and public space, street theatre, theatre and the public sphere, European performance and political theory, theatre and urban (re)development, theatre and labour, theatrical space, and theatrical engagements with memory and temporality.

I currently co-supervise projects on performance and public space in Iran and on labour practices in the American theatre industry.

Prospective Ph.D. students should send a current CV and 1500-word research proposal. University guidance on writing such a proposal can be found here.

Please note I am unlikely to supervise practice-based research projects as lead supervisor.

In my classes on theatre history and theory, students explore the relationships between theatre and its social world, and between text, image, and performance. I ask students to consider what we can and cannot learn from different kinds of evidence, how to develop strong arguments based on that evidence, and how to craft their arguments as creative academic writers.

I currently teach the following units:

DRAM20051: Theatres of Modernity

DRAM20221: Performing America

DRAM30292: Performance and Public Space

DRAM30001 and DRAM30002: The Dissertation

DRAM30990: The Extended Dissertation