CO-CHAIRS
Clare Parfitt is an interdisciplinary dance scholar working between popular dance studies, memory studies and Atlantic studies. At the University of Chichester she has been a Reader in Popular Dance and she is currently a PhD Supervisor. From 2014-2016, she was Principal Investigator on an AHRC Leadership Fellowship project titled ‘Dancing with Memory’, and is also a member of the AHRC Peer Review College. Clare is Chair of PoP Moves, an international network for popular dance research, and her dance practice engages with local salsa, street dance and Caribbean dance communities. She is currently collaborating with Dr Celena Monteiro on a project titled ‘Mapping Atlantic (Im)mobilities: Caribbean dance communities in London and their diasporic connections’, funded by Kingston University. She is the editor of Cultural Memory and Popular Dance: Dancing to remember, dancing to forget (Palgrave, 2021), and is completing a monograph provisionally titled The Kinetics of Memory: Popular dance between France and the Atlantic World (OUP).
Carmen Levick is a Senior Lecturer in theatre at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests include memory and trauma studies, and the politics and performative characteristics of commemorating the Holocaust and communism in Central and Eastern Europe. Her current work focuses on public representations of trauma in Romania, Hungary and Kosovo.
Martina Karels is an Assistant Professor of Communication Arts at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, NY. Her work on public memory centres on remembrance in everyday life, particularly when done in public spaces, digital culture and digital archives. She has written on performance of public remembrance of 9/11, and has worked on memory work in prison museums in Iraqi Kurdistan and women-led theatre activism in Argentina. She is the co-creator of Clayoquot Lives: An Eco feminist Story Web, a digital archive of oral history interviews remembering the 1993 Peace Camp in Clayoquot Sound, Canada. The project team is writing a book on DIY Academic Archiving (under contract with Palgrave Macmillan).