Rate My Professor Alyson Campbell

Professor Alyson Campbell is Professor in Theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne, where she also serves as Course Coordinator for Research Higher Degrees. She earned a Practice as Research PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2009 on 'Experiencing Kane: an affective approach to Sarah Kane', a Master's degree (Coursework and Research) and Postgraduate Certificate from the University of Leeds, and a Bachelor's degree. Hailing from Northern Ireland, Campbell boasts a 30-year career as a freelance director and dramaturg. Her early career included collaboration with queer auteur Reza Abdoh in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, followed by lecturing positions in theatre studies and drama at Queen's University Belfast and Brunel University London. She joined the University of Melbourne in 2013 as Associate Professor in Theatre (Directing and Dramaturgy).

Campbell's academic interests center on queer performance and queer dramaturgies, affect theory and performance, HIV and AIDS in performance, Practice as Research methodologies, fat-queer subversive fun, feminist theatre research, queer pedagogies, and feral pedagogies. She co-leads the Feral Queer Camp, facilitating queer performance networks and utopian curricula beyond traditional academia, with events in Belfast and Melbourne. Her influence extends through editorial and creative contributions. Key publications include co-editing Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and authoring Viral Dramaturgies: HIV and AIDS in Performance in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Recent works feature 'Up and Down: The Queer and Affective Potential of (the) Transition' (2023), 'Embracing Feral Pedagogies: Queer Feminist Education through Queer Performance' (2022), 'Baking Cake Daddy: transforming fat-phobia to fat-positivity with a slice of fat-queer subversive fun' (2022), and 'On Care-fulness: Critical Creative Expressions of Care in a Feminist Theatre Research Project' (2021). Through teaching, activism, and practice, she disrupts institutional normativities, advocating feral and queer approaches to theatre.