Swati Arora

Swati Arora is an academic and writer based in London, UK.

Her research thinks with minoritarian performance and visual culture, feminist theory, and de-post/colonial politics while experimenting with intimate forms of scholarly writing and dissemination. Across her research, writing and pedagogy, she is curious about how different aesthetic practices diffract colonial and imperial histories, epistemologies, and their corresponding debris.

Engaging with the intersections of coloniality, geography, and racialisation, her current book project looks at aesthetic practices, archival traces, nonhuman creatures, and embodied experiences in postcolonial Delhi. It explores how performance and visual arts contend with the densely entangled processes of urbanisation, ecological crises, and sociopolitical environment, while navigating the dynamics of class, caste, gender, sexuality, and religion. In addition to its political focus on Delhi, this research is situated within the international conjuncture of transnational dialogues around public space and belonging, galvanised by anti-caste activism, anti-racist pedagogies, and abolitionist futurities.

Currently, Swati is Senior Lecturer in Performance and Global South Studies at Queen Mary University of London. Prior to joining Queen Mary, she worked at King’s College London. This followed Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships in Visual History and Theory at the Centre for Humanities Research and then at the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, UWC, South Africa, where she remains as a Research Fellow. She is a recipient of the Early Career Researcher Prize 2024, awarded by the Theatre and Performance Research Association, UK.