Dr Claire French is Assistant Professor in Dramaturgy at Aarhus University, Denmark, where she previously held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellowship, following an Assistant Professorship at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research investigates the ethics, aesthetics, and epistemologies of multilingual dramaturgies within socially engaged and ensemble traditions. With a methods-driven approach, she draws on sociolinguistics, decolonial theory, and performance studies to develop analytical strategies for identifying and rethinking how the body reproduces language ideologies.
French’s artistic research spans a wide range of making practices across performance training, community facilitation, ensemble devising, and playwriting. Her artistic practice deepens her inquiry through roles as facilitator, dramaturg and playwright, with recent plays including Courage Songs (2024) and Die tong (The Tongue) (2025) with Mercy Kannemeyer.
French responds to language asymmetries in performance across South Africa, Australia and the UK, using her experience in Anglophone-dominant contexts to mediate between multilingual practices and perceived monolingual frameworks, and to examine the geopolitical consequences of storytelling that misrepresents the global majority; newer research extends these questions to the Nordics, Germany and Poland.
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Co-editor of Applied Theatre Research (Intellect) with Taiwo Afolabi and Bobby Smith, and Co-director of Reading Decoloniality (University of Warwick) with Nadeen Dakkak, Teodora Todorova and Asanda Ngoasheng.
Associate fellowships at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) and the University of Warwick (UK).
More about Claire at clairefrench.com
