Asia Centre Members
Meet the academics and staff involved in the Asia Centre.
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Directors
Annie Guo
Annie originally trained as a classical Chinese dancer from the age of ten before moving on to train in contemporary ballet; she subsequently attended Beijing Dance Academy and graduated with a BA in Musical Theatre Performance.
She first came to Goldsmiths in 2004 to study for her MA as a Producer in Musical Theatre. In 2008 she completed a course in Business Financial Forecasting and Marketing at the London Business Study Centre.
Her vision is to create a bridge between Eastern and Western culture, especially between China and the UK, not only in the teaching of language but also in the cross-cultural exchange of education, arts, history, customs and other social and cultural aspects.
Michael Dutton
Professor Michael Dutton joined the Politics and International Relations department in 2006, having previously taught in Australia where he was also educated.
His research is characterized by a strong interest in contemporary social and cultural theory wed to a specific 'archive' called China. This has led to a range of rather disparate set of issues that quite often move his work out of the specifics of China. His current interests include an investigation of the politics of the gift, a study of the friend/enemy distinction, and an appreciation of the importance of everyday life in the flow of politics.
Members
Mike Featherstone
Mike Featherstone (BA, MA Durham, PhD State University of Utrecht) is Professor of Sociology in ICCE. He joined Goldsmiths Sociology Department in January 2013 and moved to ICCE in January 2016. He was previously Research Professor of Sociology and Communications and Director of the Theory, Culture & Society Centre at Nottingham Trent University.
He has spent time as a visiting professor in Barcelona, Geneva, Kyoto, Recife, São Paulo, Singapore, Tokyo and Vancouver. He currently spends part of the year working with colleagues at the University of Tokyo and Tokyo University of the Arts on a project on the Olympics.
Anna Furse
Anna Furse has been working in the Department of Theatre and Performance for almost twenty years. She directs the MA in Performance Making and recently created the new BA in Comedy and Satire. She is Co-Director of The Centre of the Body, an interdisciplinary hub for investigating issues of the body.
An award-winning professional theatre director and writer, she continues to make new works internationally with her company Athletes of the Heart.
Michael Hitchcock
Michael Hitchcock is Professor in Cultural Policy and Tourism at Goldsmiths, University of London. He conducts practice-based work on cultural tourism and cultural heritage management, especially with regard to Asia. He took his doctorate at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford in 1983 based on his research and a practice-based project in eastern Indonesia. He also worked as a research assistant at the museum before going to conduct his fieldwork.
Caroline Knowles
Caroline writes about migration and circulations of material objects – some of the social forces constituting globalisation. She is interested in cities, having done research in London, Hong Kong, Beijing, Fuzhou, Addis Ababa, Kuwait City and Seoul.
She is currently the Director of the British Academy’s Cities and Infrastructure Programme, which comprises a portfolio of 18 multi-disciplinary projects delivering, with local partners, vital improvements in infrastructure in cities in the global south.
Professor Richard Noble
Richard Noble is Professor and Head of the Art Department at Goldsmiths College. He is a political philosopher by training, who has migrated into the art world. His research is primarily focused on utopian strategies in contemporary art and their connection to the concept of utopia in philosophy and political thought.
He is the editor of Utopias, which was published in the MIT/Whitechapel Documents in Contemporary Art series, and has written numerous essays on contemporary artists, including Antony Gormley, Rachel Whiteread, David Batchelor, Mona Hatoum and Hannah Collins.
Dr Barley Norton
Dr Barley Norton is an ethnomusicologist and filmmaker with research interests in the music and culture of Southeast Asia. He is the director of Goldsmiths’ Asian Music Unit (AsMU), the convenor of the MA in Music (Ethnomusicology), and the leader of the Goldsmiths Gamelan Group. He has conducted extensive field research in Vietnam and his publications include a monograph on ritual music and spirit possession titled Songs for the Spirits: Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam (University of Illinois Press, 2009).
As part of a Getty-funded research project on contemporary experimental performance culture in Vietnam he made the critically acclaimed film Hanoi Eclipse: The Music of Dai Lam Linh (Documentary Educational Resources, 56 minutes, 2010).
Dr Tomoko Tamari
Tomoko joined Goldsmiths in 2013 after being a research fellow at Nottingham Trent University. Her academic background is in sociology, mass communication studies and women’s studies. Her current academic interests cross over sociology, cultural studies and body studies.
Conrad Heyns
Conrad has been a teacher and a teacher trainer for over 30 years and taught and trained in numerous countries - from High Schools in South Africa to training centres in China and Peru and from private language schools in Australia and the USA to Higher Education in the United Kingdom.