Arts Lab

19th May 2026, 11am to 12:30, venue tbc

A roundtable discussion delivered by two directors of the ArtsLab Lab, Dr Enza De Franscisci and Prof Eva Moreda Rodriguez, and featuring also Dr Vera Wolkwowicz, as part of the "Write of Spring" festival (more details to follow).

With English gaining hegemony as the lingua franca of academic publishing, and British universities actively pursuing internationalization, increasingly more researchers who do not have English as their first language (L1) find themselves sustainedly publishing in English, sometimes while also keeping a parallel writing practice in more languages. Similarly, native English speakers increasingly find themselves supporting PGR students, or writing collaboratively with colleagues who do not. The hegemony of English has been repeatedly cited as disadvantageous to non-natives, and this has particular implications for the Arts and Humanities, where writing is often not merely functional and communicative, but key to shaping contributions and establishing an academic identity. This roundtable brings together three CoAH staff with extensive experience of writing across languages and supporting others to do so to share experiences and interrogate how writing across languages can be not simply accommodated, but supported and celebrated in an inclusive and sustainable manner.

19th June, 5-7pm, Room 237C, Advanced Reearch Centre

This roundtable brings together historians and theorists of early and contemporary media to examine the roles of women in the early history of recorded sound. Exploring how gender shaped sound cultures across domestic, performing and commercial contexts, it considers the emergence of gendered soundscapes in the home, as well as the often invisible forms of labour performed by women within the early recording industry. The roundtable will also address questions of mediation and voice, including the inclusion and exclusion of women in recordings and in broader representations of early recorded sound. Finally, it will engage with archival presence and absence, reflecting on how women are represented in historical records, which narratives have been constructed from this evidence, and how alternative accounts might be recovered by present-day research.

Panellists: Dr. Barbara Gentili (Surrey University), Dr. Elodie A. Roy (Durham University), Dr. Marie Thompson (The Open University). Chaired by Prof. Eva Moreda Rodriguez (University of Glasgow)

This roundtable has been supported by the ArtsLab Lab From Page to Stage, the Royal Music Association and Thinking Culture. It is a free, public-facing event organized in the context of the Early Recording Association Conference Unheard Legacies: Rethinking Early Recording Stories.

Our directors have organized a range of events bringing together those researching various forms of translation and multilingualism in the performing arts - going beyond the idea of the stage work as linguistic "text" which can, as such, be translated into another language, and considering a range of performance contexts, parameters and ideologies. Examples of past events include:

Translation Studies Symposium: From Page to Stage. 1 December 2025, Advanced Research Centre (Studio 2), University of Glasgow

This Symposium brought together Translation Studies, Performing Arts, and Visual Culture in investigating how artistic works, from theatre to dance to film and the visual arts, are translated across communities and media. The interdisciplinary event welcomed scholars, students, and practitioners from around the UK, Europe, and China to consider how translation is a performative act and mode of social practice, influenced by agents, networks, and the specific material and digital contexts in which it occurs. The event marks the 10th anniversary for our Glasgow-Nankai Joint Graduate School partnership. Sponsors included the College of Arts and Humanities ArtsLab ‘Page to Stage’ Theme, the Joint Graduate School, the College of Arts and Humanities, the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, the Maxwell Stirling Centre, the Society for Pirandello Studies, and Italian-Scotland.

Multilingualism in Art Song. 9 December 2025, Advanced Research Centre, University of Glasgow

The last several years have seen a shift away from purely analytical/formalist approaches to art song, with greater attention being deployed to the genre’s performance’s contexts, and in particular to its remarkable mobility and global ramifications (Tunbridge 2018, Loges and Tunbridge 2022). Within this area of research, a nascent, yet not fully developed, strand concerns the interface between art song and multilingualism. The present one-day event provided a forum for those working on any aspect of multilingualism in art song, and included seven papers on topics ranging from the translation of art song, art song in minoritized languages, to the challenges of performing music in lesser represented languages. It concluded with a workshop (funded by a British Academy Talent Award) in which five singers workshoped and performed a song in a language previously unfamiliar to them.

A further strand of this Lab has also been in exploring how performance can act as a catalyst to amplify minoritized identities that go beyond language or culture. The notion of translation also plays a key role here, in situating translation as a set of practices not necessarily lingustic that seek to make certain works or practices understandable to audiences different than their intended ones. Activities have included:

Amplifying Queer Composers: Understanding Marginalized Composers and the Impact that has on Student Engagement and Learning Outcomes, presenting a number of newly composed works for tuba

Lecture recital by Steph Frye-Clark (Eastern Tennessee State University), 30th May 2024, University of Glasgow

Performing a 13th-century romance: binaries and non-binaries in the Roman de Silence

This programme curated and performed by Prof Eva Moreda Rodriguez considers the question, how can the story of the Roman de Silence (a textual narrative telling the story of a girl brought up as a boy) be told through assembling a range of medieval repertoire that does not necessarily share the same characters and themes, but draws attention to the various binaries (including gender, but also other) that extend throughout the text? Performed at Medieval Music on the Dales festival in Castle Bolton, Yorkshire (13th September 2024), and at the Advanced Research Centre (3rd March 2025).

Our directors have been involved in a range of activities aimed at helping performing arts organizations in intercultural exchange - be it learning about comparable cultural traditions elsewhere that can enhance their practice, be it about interventions centred around language and translation that can help these organizations reach new, international audiences. Examples have included:

Music festival Música no Claustro, Tui, Galicia. 1-7 August, 2024

Prof Eva Moreda Rodríguez will be writer-in-residence throughout the festival, working on a translation of the 1924 article "Music in Spanish Galicia", by J. B. Trend. In conversation with musicians and the general public, she discussed what the significance of this article, as well as other writings by British travellers to Galicia, is as a source to learn more about historical Galician traditional music and foster exchange between Galicia and the UK. Listen to Eva's talk here (in Galician).

Surtitling Tararà. Empedocleo Agrigento, Sicily. 28 June, 2024.

Dr Enza De Francisci and PhD researcher Ruggiero Bianchi maximised the opportunity of the City of Culture celebrations in Sicily by producing new English surtitles around the Sicilian play, Tararà, with excerpts adapted from ‘The Truth’ (1912), Cap and Bells (1916), and The Rules of the Game (1918) by Nobel-Prize winning author, Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936). The resources will offer an innovative model for safeguarding vulnerable languages. Funded by an AHRC IAA grant. Watch a range of audiovisual content here including an excerpt from the play.

Visit to Scotland of Sicilian Teatro dei Pupi. The Scottish Mask & Puppet Centre, Glasgow. 8 October, 2024.

Dr Enza De Francisci organized a visit of an artist in the Sicilian Teatro dei Pupi tradition to The Scottish Mask & Puppet Centre in Glasgow. Through the use of a variety of puppets, backdrops, and stage props, Giacomo Cuticchio paid tribute to the ancient family craft, performing a demonstration showcasing specific movements and acting techniques. Through a video projection, the audience was able to view places and testimonials related to the Teatro dell’Opera dei Pupi, thus engaging with the puppeteer who will share anecdotes and stories from his personal experience, responding to questions from the audience in a conversation with Dr Enza De Francisci.

Supporting the Naro Passion Play through Translation. Naro, Sicily, 25 April, 2025.

Dr Enza De Francisci and PhD student Valentina Cralli created a range of surtitling and translation resources to support the traditional Sicilian-language Passion Play staged yearly in Naro, and included in the UNESCO list of protected heritage. The project was aimed at inspiring new, more inclusive, approaches to staging the Sacred Representations and, more generally, at generating a new understanding of the value of preserving and promoting minoritised performance cultures through translation. Watch a video of the Passion Play here.

Lab directors:

Eva Moreda Rodríguez is Professor of Music at the University of Glasgow. Originally a scholar of Spanish music under Franco and in exile, in the last few years her work has centered performance more decidedly: her Cambridge Elements monograph Singing zarzuela, 1896-1958: Exploring portamento and musical expression through historical recordings (2024), as well as several journal articles and chapters, have pioneered the study of singing performance practice in Spanish zarzuela. She is also interested in singing performance practice in the Middle Ages, working mostly with repertoires from the 11^th to the 13^th centuries, and integrating her practice as an organettist and singer in her research.

Ongoing and recent projects:

Rethinking Early Recordings as Sources of Music and Performance History. This AHRC-funded network, which ran between 2021 and 2023, brought together researchers, performers, curators, technicians and collectors from all over the world who use early recordings (roughly defined as pre-Second World War) as sources for the study of music history and music performance, pioneering ways in which practical, hands-on approaches can influence critical, contextual and empirical ones, and vice-versa. The network has since morphed into the Early Recordings Association.

Performing a 13th-century romance: the Roman de Silence. This project puts together a programme of 13^th-century English and French music to illustrate the Roman de Silence, drawing upon historical performance practice, notions of collage and authorship, and multimediality in medieval manuscripts. The project will culminate with a performance by Eva at the festival Medieval Music in the Dales.

Enza De Francisci is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Glasgow and Programme Director of the Glasgow-Nankai (China) Translation Studies MSc double-degree. Recent publications include her monograph, A “New” Woman in Verga and Pirandello: From Page to Stage (Oxford: Legenda, 2018); her co-edited volume Shakespeare and Italy: Transnational Exchange from the Early Modern Period to the Present with Chris Stamatakis (London-New York: Routledge, 2017); and co-edited special edition, ‘Translation and Performance Cultures’ in Translation Studies (2022) with Cristina Marinetti.

Ongoing projects: 

Translating Pirandello. As Agrigento becomes Italy’s City of Culture in 2025, the project is reflecting on the need to make theatre productions more accessible for in-coming audiences. To support this, the project will maximise the opportunity of the City of Culture celebrations by producing new translation resources (English surtitles, and Italian-English bilingual advertisements and theatre programmes) around a case-study play by Nobel-Prize winning author, Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), to be staged on Friday 28th June 2024 to mark the anniversary of his birth. The resources will offer an innovative model for safeguarding vulnerable languages. While lesser-spoken languages tend to be dethroned by ‘dominant’ languages in translation processes, the surtitles will allow international audiences to follow the performances in the original language, and the bilingual advertisements and theatre programmes will help spectators to understand the context of the play, while also protecting the original Sicilian language on stage (considered a “vulnerable language” by UNESCO).

Gameli Tordzro is multiple-arts practitioner, educator and artistic researcher. He is Artist in Residence/Lecturer of UNESCO Chair on Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts (RILA), and is Research Associate of the UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund South-South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub (MIDEQ), at Glasgow University. He is a member of the UNESCO Arts Lab and the Society for Artistic Research, and a founding member of Meli Creatives, the Ha Orchestra, and AdinkraLinks Network. He has produced and directed several research documentary films, such as Music Across Borders (2016), Broken World Broken Word (2017), and Gedzem Kutrikuku (2018). Recent books include Mazungumzo Ya Shairi (2020) and Speaking Beyond (in press).

Anselm Heinrich is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Theatre in Europe Under German Occupation (2017), Theater in der Region (2012) and Entertainment, Education, Propaganda. Regional Theatres in Germany and Britain (2007). He has co-edited a collection of essays on Ruskin, The Theatre, and Victorian Visual Culture (2009), and is under contract for a volume on institutional dramaturgy in twentieth-century Germany. He is currently working on a book on theatre in Britain during WW2 (for OUP). He has received fellowships at Harvard, Oxford and Marburg, and is co-editor of Theatre Notebook.