Professor Royona Mitra
Associate PVC (EDI) / Professor - Dance and Performance Cultures

Research area(s)

Interculturalism and Performance Studies

Critical Race Theory and Performance Studies

Postcolonial Studies, Decolonialities and Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies

Dance, Performance and Diaspora Studies

South Asian Dance Studies

Research Interests

Royona's research examines systems of oppression in dance and performance cultures at the intersections of bodies, social power regimes, and choreography as resistance, and she contributes to the fields of diaspora and performance, South Asian dance and performance cultures, critical dance studies and performance studies.

Her first monograph Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism analyses the relationship between this British-Asian dance artist's complex identity-positions and his art through the lens of ‘new interculturalism’. Through seven key case studies from Khan’s oeuvre, this book demonstrates how Khan’s philosophy and aesthetic of ‘new interculturalism’ is a challenge to the 1980s predominantly western ‘intercultural theatre’ project, as a more nuanced and embodied approach to representing Othernesses, from his own position of the Other. Additionally, the book challenges popular perception of Khan’s art as contemporary South Asian dance by suggesting that, instead, Khan uses South Asian dramaturgical principles to transform the western contemporary dance landscape in intercultural ways. Offering the first full-length investigation of Akram Khan’s work, this book is essential reading for students, researchers, practitioners and fans of Khan’s work.

Her current book project titled Unmaking Contact: Choreographing South Asian Touch contracted with Oxford University Press and scheduled for publication in 2025, interrogates the politics of choreographing touch at the intersections of race, gender, caste, faith, sexuality, new interculturalisms and decoloniaity, and reframes contact in choreography beyond tactility through foregrounding transnational South Asian choreographic practices. 

Royona is currently working alongside Dr. Prarthana Purkayastha (Royal Holloway University, UK) and Dr. Anusha Kedhar (University of California, Riverside) on a project titled “South Asian Dance Equity (SADE): The Arts British South Asian Dance Ignores,” which is being funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as a Dance Research Matters Network Grant project. 

She is also working on a double volume co-edited anthology project alongside Drs Anurima Banerji (UCLA, USA) and Jasmine Johnson (UPenn, USA) titled The Oxford Handbooks of Dance Praxis, contracted with Oxford University Press.

She completed a British Academy Small Grant funded project titled ‘Contemporary Dance and Whiteness' alongside Drs Simon Ellis (Coventry) and Arabella Stanger (Sussex) in 2019. The project’s aim was to examine race and racism in British contemporary dance and to critique whiteness as part of a commitment to the field’s anti-racist futures. The project examines whiteness as a structure of racism that exists in the relationships between personal prejudice, cultural norms, and the lived conditions of inequality and racial violence. 

Working in coalition with UK and US colleagues from across theatre and dance studies, Royona has been leading conversations on anti-racism for these disciplines as a scholar and an educator, with a strong commiment  to dismantling their whiteness.