Overview

The School of Creative and Performing Arts is a thriving and diverse hub for interdisciplinary artistic research.

Our academics explore the arts and humanities with research enquiries that cuts across arts and social engagement, heritage and arts in health. Our key research themes reflect the university’s key research themes which are:

• Environment, Ecology and Sustainability
• Social Justice, Identity and Empowerment
• Digital Futures, Innovation and Enterprise
• Community, Culture and Heritage
• Health, Wellbeing, Creativity and Belief

The School foregrounds research of regional, national and international significance in Dance, Design, Drama, Film, Fine Art, Art and Design History, and Music within a globalized cultural environment.

Research in the fields of Arts and Culture in the School has expanded considerably in recent years, and has been marked by historicist and culturalist approaches. 

Stephe Harrop’s most recent book is Contemporary Storytelling Performance: Female Artists on Practices, Platforms, Presences (Routledge, 2023) which documents the work of a generation of artists innovating in interdisciplinary collaboration. She was awarded a grant from The British Academy for the project ‘Researching New Repertoires with England’s Storytelling Artists’, seeking to identify how artists and academics can work together to create more ethical, sustainable approaches to selecting stories for performance (2023-5). She has recently completed a two-year project with the Village Storytelling Centre, ‘Exploring Contemporary Glasgow Identity Through Storytelling’, funded by Creative Scotland (2024-5). And she is currently working with storytelling artists in Berlin to create a new spoken-word project, exploring untold and newly-imagined stories of the city.

Dr Silvia Battista’s latest publication is the edited book Mattering Spiritualities: Performative Experiments for a Radical Imagining of the World Becoming in collaboration with Dr David Mason. The book brings together an array of international scholars and practitioners to explore spirituality in embodiment through the lens of performance, performative writing, and performance studies.

The book concerns spirituality and takes the body as the site of whatever it is we call spirituality. The methodological assumption is that the opposition of body and spirit is a false binary that calls for re-examination and revision. It stems from the argument that people can deliberately shift their boundaries of perception and knowing through practice, technologies and performative techniques that can alter the way in which they perceive the ecologies in which they are embedded. This approach understands that careful attention to which bodies are performing in any given scenario is crucial, as is a sensitivity to the ramifications of any body’s race, gender, class, and biological ability. Performance can therefore be regarded as anything through which individuals and collectives' experiment with bodies as technologies. 

In 2025 Battista was invited by Dr Rosemary Hancock and Professor Paul Bramadat to present to the interdisciplinary symposium Spirituality, Place and the Body at The University of Notre Dame, Australia. The presentation is now going to develop into the chapter ‘Migrating Bodies - Nomadic Subjectivities - Neoliberal Impossibilities’ for the book Spirituality, Place and the Body to be published with Columbia University Press in 2026.

Brown’s work on children’s media cultures and Gulam’s research on celebrity stardom.

Dr Gary Anderson is Associate Professor and former Head of the School of Creative and Performing Arts. His research sits at the intersection of applied theatre, radical philosophy, and prison education, and connects directly to the School's core themes of Social Justice, Identity and Empowerment and Community, Culture and Heritage.

Dr Anderson co-directs HMP2HOPE with Dr Niamh Malone, a ten-year programme of philosophy and radio drama education delivered across prisons in the UK and internationally. The project has generated a sustained body of peer-reviewed scholarship that demonstrates how arts-based prison education can produce forms of recognition and transformation unavailable through conventional pedagogy. His most recent publication, 'From HMP2HOPE: Radio, Philosophy and Recognition in Prison Education' (Networking: Catholic Education Today, 2026), reflects on the project's pedagogical philosophy and its implications for Catholic education and social engagement. Earlier work, 'Odyssey on the Airwaves: A Journey from HMP to Hope', published in Sonic Engagement: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Community Engaged Audio Practice (Routledge, 2023), examined the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of collaborative radio-making with prisoners, whilst 'Antonin Artaud Beyond Judgment', in A Companion to Literary Evaluation (Wiley Blackwell, 2024), explored how radical performance philosophy can reframe questions of judgment, agency and selfhood in carceral contexts. Two co-authored books - Philosophy from the Big House and Podcasts for Prisoners (both Liverpool Hope University Press, 2024/5) - present the project's accumulated practice and theory for wider academic and practitioner audiences.

Dr Anderson's broader research engages non-philosophy, aesthetics, and radical education theory, reflected in his co-edited volume Art Disarming Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) and a series of articles in Performance Research and Research in Drama Education. His work has been presented at nationally and internationally including Tate Liverpool, Tate Modern, and in leading academic conferences including Performance Studies International, TaPRA and various conferences internationally in Australia, Greece and the Netherlands, reflecting the School's ambition for research of world leading standards. 

Socially Engaged Projects

The research activity undertaken in the School is concerned with the pursuit of social justice and inclusivity in the arts and cultural industries. Thus, activities benefit wider society through social interventions within the four identified research areas.

Dr Zoe Zontou collaborates with the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse Theatres to establish a creative hub for individuals in recovery from alcohol and drug dependency. This initiative provides a platform for participants to showcase artistic work while recognising artists in recovery as a vital part of the city’s cultural landscape.

Dr Niamh Malone founded Liverpool Hope Theatre Company, which delivers a range of applied theatre projects in Merseyside and Cheshire to ‘vulnerable’ groups. Since 2014, Malone mentored 3-5 drama facilitators each year, with 33 artists in total having been employed. In 2014 Malone launched the project Forgotten Futures and the City which she delivers in nursing homes and prisons across the region. You can find out more via Liverpool Hope Theatre Company.

In Dance, Dr Sarah Black has developed an intergenerational mother-led artistic practice Mother as Curator, where she explores her own solo performance work and performs with her family within their family home.

Dr Silvia Battista together with the collective Material Matters, Wirral Borough of Culture, Liverpool Hope University and the Williamson Gallery and Museum offered Weavers (2024) a free programme of talks, poetry readings, performances, school workshops and artist discussions as part of the larger project Into the Wyld. By engaging with myth, folklore and heritage the programme targeted the local communities of Birkenhead with many participants entering a gallery space for the first time.  

Dr Silvia Battista:

• The Weavers, 2024: Williamson Gallery and Museum. A performance in collaboration with Alice Colquhoun and Amodali on the figure of Morgan LeFay to explore womanhood, loss, trauma and ecological entanglement from the lens of new materialism. 
• ACT III – Interspecies: The Fairies / ACT II - The Knights Of The 21st Century / ACT I - Moon Lullaby For Humans 2024. Williamson Gallery and Museum. Three speculative fiction animations and voice, re-visiting the tale of Sir Gawain And The Green Knight through contemporary lenses - new materialism, queer studies and posthumanism.  
• “From Cancer To Wounds To Thresholds To Interworlds: Stories About Openings, Closures, And Possibilities Of Becoming”. In Mattering Spiritualities: Performative Experiments for A Radical Imagining Of The World Becoming, Silvia Battista and David Mason Eds. Routledge: 2025. An analytical  autoethnographic research on wounds and recovery.
• ‘Meditations with Julian of Norwich: an autoethnographic account on embodiment, spirituality and womanhood’ in the edited book Performance, Faith, and the Ordinary by invitation, to be published in 2027. The chapter will consist in a speculative fiction on the relationship between Julian of Norwich and myself, an imaginary encounter between a woman of the 14^th century and a woman of the 21^st century to reflect together about what it means to have a body. The fragments left by Julian of Norwich – physical, verbal and spiritual – will be employed as maps for reflecting, sensing and experiencing the body as a site of spiritual, political and performative expressions of womanhood. At the same time, it will provide opportunities to speculate further on the value that the spiritual dimensions of quietness have within contemporaneity and on the complex relation between liberation and constraints.
• Stones Coming From The Sky, 2026. An MM production at the Bridewell Studio Gallery: three rooms installations, drawings and a performative lecture on the phenomenon of meteorites to reflect and engage with deep time, infinitude and the cosmos.
• Sirens: Voices Beyond Borders 2027/2028 is a project supported by the Independent Biennial and in partnership with Liverpool University; British Art & Design Association; Hilbre Island Bird Observatory; Bidston Observatory Artistic Research; and KORA Contemporary Art Centre (Italy). Led by the artist collective Material Matters - Silvia Battista, Angelo Madonna, John Elcock and Patric Rogers - in collaboration with professor Sarah Perverley, the project connects the watery imaginaries of Merseyside (UK) & Salento (Italy). Through new commissions, a major waterfront installation, public programme and international exchange, the project reimagines sirens and aquatic mythologies to explore place, care, ecology and connection across coastal communities. It forms a two-year exchange between the Irish and Mediterranean Seas.

Conferences and Research Events

The School has hosted a number of international conferences and symposia, which all involved industry panels or public access. Several were collaborations with external stakeholders that connect researchers with local and national artists, thereby underpinning the School’s research mission, such as TATE conferences.

Connections with the City

The School has had strong formalised ties with a number of regional, national, and international partners. The relationship with TATE Liverpool continues to support interdisciplinary collaborative research, with staff having utilised the resources of TATE Liverpool to organise symposia and public engagement events. The School’s partnership with the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse Theatres focuses on synergies between the theatre’s community practitioners and the Drama, Dance and Performance area’s research themes. Finally, the School has a number of national and international partnerships.

Contact Us

For further information about the School of Creative and Performing Arts Research portfolio, please contact Dr Zoe Zontou, Research Lead for the School of Creative and Performing Arts, email: zontouz@hope.ac.uk or telephone: 0151 291 3598.