Profile
Rashna Darius Nicholson is a cultural historian who holds a PhD (summa cum laude) in Theatre Studies from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She studied Performance Studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the University of Copenhagen and held a junior research fellowship at the ERC-Developing Theatres project at the University of Munich. In recent years, she has been a fellow at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and the National Humanities Center. She is the recipient of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council Early Career Award and two HKU early career research awards. Her research and teaching specializations include nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty first century theatre history, historiography, and practice; postcolonial and world literature; and cultural development. Rashna’s first monograph, The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage: The Making of the Theatre of Empire (1853-1893), which traces the origins and early development of the colonial South Asian theatre, is winner of the Theatre Library Association George Freedley Memorial Award Special Jury Prize and finalist of the TAPRA David Bradby Monograph Prize and the ASTR Barnard Hewitt Award. She is currently working on three projects: the influence of the Rockefeller and Ford foundations on theatre in the Global South during and after the Cold War, the history of the Festival of India (1985-86), and creative industries and digital media in Hong Kong.
