Tiziana Morosetti
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Tiziana specialises in African Theatre and representations of race, Blackness and the ‘Other’ in British theatre.
Dr Tiziana Morosetti holds a laurea (MA equivalent) in Foreign Languages and Literatures (English and German) from the Università degli Studi Roma Tre, and a Ph.D in Literatures and Cultures in English (African Literatures) from the Alma Mater Studiorum-Università di Bologna. She taught at Bologna before moving to the UK as a Marie Curie Research Fellow at Oxford, where she investigated representations of the ‘exotic’ and the non-European ‘Other’ in Georgian and Victorian drama. Her current research explores representations of race, otherness and Blackness in 19th-century and contemporary British theatre. Her other field of expertise is African theatre, with teaching and research on the Nigerian stage and the work of Femi Osofisan in particular. Tiziana is the current General Secretary of the African Theatre Association (AfTA), as well as the co-founder and deputy director of the journal Quaderni del ’900, and she is also a member of the Centre for Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths.
Academic qualifications
- PDF Learning, Teaching and Assessing Award, University of Oxford 2017
- PhD in Literatures and Cultures in English (African Literatures), Alma Mater Studiorum-Università di Bologna 2006
- Laurea (MA equivalent) in Foreign Languages and Literatures (English and German), Università degli Studi Roma Tre 2001
Teaching and supervision
Research interests
Tiziana’s work has focused on two main areas, African Theatre (especially Nigerian drama and the work of Femi Osofisan), and the representation of race, blackness, and the ‘Other’ in 19th-century and contemporary British theatre and popular performance. On these areas she has published widely, including one monograph on Nigerian theatre in English (2009), four edited collections, and several essays. She is currently writing a monograph on the representation of Blackness and African cultures in Georgian and Victorian drama. Tiziana is also interested in African literature more widely, including research and publications on speculative and crime fiction from Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. Other interests include Postcolonial Italian literature, on which she published in 2005 the first collection of essays on the subject, and intersections between Italian and English literatures. The theatre of W.H. Auden, on which she published a monograph (2009), remains an ongoing passion.
Featured publications
2018:
Africa on the Contemporary London Stage
A collection of essays on representations of Africa on the London stage from 1950 to the present, and on the activity of African playwrights and companies in London
2017:
‘Etc. Etc.: Replicating the ‘Exotic’ Body on the Nineteenth-Century British Stage’
An essay on the use and replication of ‘exotic’ images and racial stereotypes across the Georgian and Victorian stage
2016:
Staging the Other in Nineteenth-Century British Drama
A collection of essays on representations of otherness and diversity in Georgian and Victorian drama, and their legacy
2013:
‘Black on Black: (In)visibility in African Literary Heterotopias’
An essay on African speculative fiction
2005:
La letteratura postcoloniale italiana
A collection of essays on Postcolonial literature in Italian, as well as on the representation of colonies in Italian writing
Grants and awards
2012:
European Union FP7 (Marie Curie Actions) REA
Marie Curie Research Fellowship
Publications and research outputs
Article
Morosetti, Tiziana. 2017. ‘Etc. Etc.’: Replicating the ‘Exotic’ Body on the Nineteenth-Century British Stage. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 24, ISSN 1755-1560
Book
Morosetti, Tiziana. 2009. Introduzione al teatro nigeriano di lingua inglese. Rome: Edizioni Associate. ISBN 9788826705125
Book Section
Morosetti, Tiziana. 2024. Appropriating the Victorian Past in African American Theatre. In: Kene Igweonu, ed. Routledge Handbook of African Theatre and Performance. Abingdon: Routledge. ISBN 9781032008400
Morosetti, Tiziana. 2024. Between Representation and Agency: Black Artists in the UK, 1900-50. In: Claire Cochraine; Lynette Goddard; Catherine Hindson and Trish Reid, eds. The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century British Theatre. Abingdon: Routledge.
Morosetti, Tiziana. 2022. Completing the Mosaic: Sara Baartman and the Archive. In: Rachel Bryant-Davies and Erin Johnson-Williams, eds. Intersectional Encounters in the Nineteenth-Century Archive: New Essays on Power and Discourse. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 171-186. ISBN 9781350200333
Conference or Workshop Item
Morosetti, Tiziana. 2023. 'Critical Readings of Femi Osofisan’s ‘Adaptations’ of the Classics'. In: Globalizing the Greek Classics: Femi Osofisan’s Re-readings of Ancient Greek Tragedy. Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada 9 November 2023.
Morosetti, Tiziana. 2022. 'Reimagining the Victorian Past in African and in Black Diasporic Theatre'. In: Centre for Comparative Literature Postcolonial Theatre Series. Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom 19 May 2022.
Morosetti, Tiziana. 2022. '“On Abyssinian Princes and Cannibal Queens”: Linguistic and Visual Representations of “Africanness” on the British Stage, 1850s-60'. In: The London Stage and the Nineteenth-Century World IV. New College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom 6 - 8 April 2022.
Edited Book
Morosetti, Tiziana and Okagbue, Osita, eds. 2021. The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9783030439569
Morosetti, Tiziana, ed. 2018. Africa on the Contemporary London Stage. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9783319945071
Morosetti, Tiziana, ed. 2016. Staging the Other in Nineteenth-Century British Drama. Oxford: Peter Lang. ISBN 9783034319287
Conferences and talks
2019:
‘Sara Baartman and the Archive’
The Nineteenth Century Archive as a Discourse of Power
2017:
‘On Sozaboy’s Darkness: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Biafra War'
Igbo Conference – Legacies of Biafra
2017:
‘Triggering Thriller(s): Eddie Iroh’s 48 Guns for the General’
African Popular Cultures Workshop – Biafra 50 Years on
2015:
‘Exotic Bodies on the 19th-century British Stage: Empire in Miniature’
Reading and Replicating Bodies: Mimicry in Medicine and Culture, 1790-1914
Supervision
Tiziana has long-term experience of supervision of undergraduate and Master’s dissertations, and welcomes enquiries in the fields of British Theatre (especially Black British); African Theatre; representations of race, blackness, and otherness in 19th-century and British theatre and popular performance (freak shows, ‘human zoos’, world fairs, and the circus); German Theatre; Italian Theatre; the theatre of W.H. Auden and the 30s more generally.