Jonathan Bollen

Biography

Jonathan Bollen is Professor in the Graduate Institute of Performing Arts at National Taiwan Normal University and Honorary Associate Professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. His wide-ranging research concerns the history of performance, mobility and desire from a transnational perspective. His award-winning monograph on Touring Variety traces developments in commercial entertainment, international touring, and entrepreneurial diplomacy across the Asia Pacific region. He has published 38 referred journal articles and book chapters, and is the co-author of three further books in theatre history. He specialises in digital approaches to researching live performance from the past.

His publications have attracted international recognition for their innovative methods of visualising the mobility of performance at scales ranging from local theatrical activity to worldwide touring networks. He is a long-term contributor to the development of AusStage, the Australian database of live performance, with funding from the Australian Research Council. He has also collaborated on archival database projects with theatre, dance and performance scholars in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Norway, Singapore and the United States. He is a life member and former president of the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies, and current editor of the Australian Playwrights book series published by Brill.