IF at the RSC

A collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company

A collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company

New fellows explore the big questions facing the creative and cultural sector

From AI to the role of the artists in social change - nine fellows are leading an international research programme to explore the future of creative and cultural practice.

As part of the programme launched by the RSC and supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), each fellow will focus on a research theme that responds to the biggest challenges faced by the creative industries and wider society today.

In collaboration with seven global organisations, their research will explore some of the biggest questions facing the creative and cultural sector today, and the changes needed for its development, future economic growth and survival, including:

Trust and reality in the age of AI
Change-making within creative institutions
Integrating traditional and innovative workflows
Places where ‘liveness’ happens - from stage to site-specific to the metaverse
Immersive exhibitions and best-practice for co-creation with audiences
Approaches to storytelling in an immersive landscape, and
The role of the artist as an agent of social change in the archive.

Following their research period, the fellows will come back together in Stratford-upon-Avon in summer 2025 for a Festival of Ideas, supported by a grant from the Rothschild Foundation, where they will share their research findings and potential opportunities for the sector. You can follow the progress of their research on the Interdisciplinary Fellowship website.

The project is led by the Royal Shakespeare Company and includes the following partners:

In America

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Stanford University
The Music Centre, LA
Brooklyn Academy of Music

In the UK

Royal Shakespeare Company
Watershed
Factory International
University of Oxford

https://www.youtube.com/embed/t_blYh7yK04?si=_arEwmxW2_sCgPLD

Amahra Spence

Fellow
Amahra Spence is an artist, curator, convener, strategist, researcher, systems designer and spatial practitioner. Inspired by social sculpture, her practice commits to infrastructure building, spatialising dream work, resource redistribution and platforming radical imagination as tactics for emancipation from systems of violence. She is most passionate about co-creating worlds and architectures that safeguard the resistance, joy and collective imagination of oppressed peoples globally.

Stephen Bailey

Fellow
Stephen Bailey is an award-winning director, producer, dramaturg and theatre-maker who works in both the UK and the rest of Europe. He won the Royal Theatrical Support Trust Sir Peter Hall Award for his production of The Real and Imagined History of the Elephant Man at Nottingham Playhouse. He is interested in subverting and evolving non-disabled structures, and challenging venues and audiences.

Professor Wes Williams

Co-academic lead
Wes Williams' main research interests are in the field of Renaissance and/or early modern literature; he has written a book on pilgrimage writing, and continues to explore travel narratives of various kinds across the period. He is now writing a book on monsters and their meanings from, roughly, Rabelais to Racine (by way of Shakespeare, Montaigne and a few others). He also works on European film, and in the theatre as a writer and director.

Professor Christine Gerrard

Co-academic lead
Christine Gerrard is the Director of TORCH. Her main areas of research are eighteenth-century political literature, and women's writing of the long eighteenth century. She is currently completing an edition of Jonathan Swift, The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen and related writings from the Queen Anne period for CUP, and an article on Swift and Robert Walpole. Her most recently published work is on eighteenth-century women and memory, with a particular focus on Irish women's writing, especially the circle around Swift.

IF at the RSC

New fellows explore the big questions facing the creative and cultural sector

People

Amahra Spence

Stephen Bailey

Professor Wes Williams

Professor Christine Gerrard

Supporting team

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