Tiziana Morosetti

Staff details

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 in 2012 as a Marie Curie Research Fellow at Oxford. Her research focuses on African Theatre, and representations of race, otherness and Blackness in 19th-century and contemporary British theatre. She is the recipient of a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (2024-26) with a project on the founding of the School of Drama at Ibadan, Nigeria, and she sits on the board of the African Theatre Association. Tiziana is also the co-founder and deputy director of the journal Quaderni del ’900, and 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

Research interests

Tiziana’s work focuses 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 co-editing, with Lynette Goddard, the Cambridge History of Black British Theatre and Performance, and is the principal investigator on a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (2024-26). 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.

Grants and awards

2024: BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant
The Making of African Theatre: Academics, Playwrights, and Theatre Practitioners at the University of Ibadan, 1952-1970

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

Guarracino, Serena and Morosetti, Tiziana. 2017. Introduction. Postcolonial Embodiments in Contemporary Performance. Textus: English Studies in Italy: Stages of Embodiment in Postcolonial Theatre, 2017(2), pp. 7-26. ISSN 1824-3967

Morosetti, Tiziana. 2015. Review: The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma. The Conversation,

Book

Morosetti, Tiziana. 2009. Introduzione al teatro nigeriano di lingua inglese. Rome: Edizioni Associate. ISBN 9788826705125

Book Section

Morosetti, Tiziana. 2024. Between Representation and Agency: Black Artists in the UK, 1900-1950. In: Claire Cochraine; Lynette Goddard; Catherine Hindson and Trish Reid, eds. The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century British Theatre and Performance - Volume One: 1900–1950. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 159-169. ISBN 9780367487898

Morosetti, Tiziana. 2024. Appropriating the Victorian Past in African-American Theatre. In: Kene Igweonu, ed. Routledge Handbook of African Theatre and Performance. London-New York: Routledge, pp. 365-377. ISBN 9781032008400

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

Edited Journal

Guarracino, Serena and Morosetti, Tiziana, eds. 2017. Stages of Embodiment in Postcolonial Theatre, Textus: English Studies in Italy, 2017(2). 1824-3967

Professional Activity

Morosetti, Tiziana. 2020. Quaderni del '900.

Conferences and talks

2023: ‘Critical Readings of Femi Osofisan’s ‘Adaptations’ of the Classics’
Globalizing the Greek Classics: Femi Osofisan’s Re-readings of Ancient Greek Tragedy conference

2022: ‘“On Abyssinian Princes and Cannibal Queens”: Linguistic and Visual Representations of “Africanness” on the British Stage, 1850s-60’
London Stage and the Nineteenth-Century World 4th conference

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.