Please join us to celebrate Professor Kélina Gotman in this Inaugural Professorial Lecture.

'My work has, over many years, in many guises, done one thing, I think: attended to how thought moves, to how concepts form and shift, across disciplines and genres. From colonial medicine and historical psychiatry, epidemiology and crowd psychology, anthropology and popular culture, to industrial management and early self-help, as well as somatics and household engineering, I have been concerned with how movements of thought constitute a choreography of a sort; how writing also performs exposure to surprise, to the swerves and riffs of thought moving. This evening, I attend further to some of the strands that have underpinned ‘performance’ discourse over the past 150 or so years – to its orders and its disorders – to think about how this apparently simple term designating ways language (and gesture) acts upon the world has come so ubiquitously to signal the quantification of action and time use within a productivist framework; and still those exuberant, at times subtle, acts of resistance and self-articulation that have also marked the history of human life in common. I will wager that noticing again such acts of language and thought moving may allow us to reoccupy ways we speak and write – and thus recover another performance commons.'

About the speaker

Kélina Gotman is Professor of Performance and the Humanities in the Department of English. She is author of Choreomania: Dance and Disorder, Essays on Theatre and Change: Towards a Poetics Of, co-editor of Foucault’s Theatres and Performance and Translation in a Global Age, editor of the four-volume Theories of Performance: Critical and Primary Sources, and author of the forthcoming What is a thoughtful life? She works widely on questions of health, movement and the history and philosophy of disciplines and institutions. She joined King’s College London in 2008.

Banner image: Unravelling IX (2005) © Liesl Pfeffer