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James Thompson

Academic Researcher

Europe, United Kingdom, Nottingham

James Thompson is Professor of Applied and Social Theatre and Associate Vice President for Social Responsibility at the University of Manchester. He established the Theatre in Prisons and Probation Centre in the 1990s and is the Founder and Co-Director of In Place of War – a project researching and developing arts programs in war and disaster zones. He has developed and run theatre projects in Africa and South Asia (principally DR Congo and Sri Lanka). He has written widely on theatre applied to conflict, peace-building, and reconciliation and his most recent books are Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect (2009) and Humanitarian Performance: from Disaster Tragedies to Spectacles of War (2014). He is now working on the relationship between the arts and care – explored in an article called Towards an Aesthetics of Care – examining the artistry of health care professional and the caring skills of artists.