All Affiliates
Honorary Assistant Professor

Dr Zoe Fortune

BSc UCL, PhD King’s College London

All Affiliates
Dr Rashna Nicholson
Honorary Assistant Professor

Dr Rashna Nicholson

MA ULB, Copenhagen; PhD Munich

Contact Information

Email

rnich@hku.hk

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. 

Publications

Selected Publications

'Banal Profundity and Profound Banality: Three Exercises in Reading Hong Kong’, TDR: The Drama Review, 66:2, (June 2022), 158-173.

The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage: The Making of the Theatre of Empire (1853-1893), Transnational Theatre Histories series, London: Palgrave Macmillan, (2021).

‘On the (Im)Possibilities of a Free Theatre’, Theatre Research International, 46:1, (January 2021).

‘Italian impresarios, American Minstrels and Parsi Theatre: Sonic Networks and the Negotiation of Opera in Colonial South and Southeast Asia’, The Cambridge Companion to Opera and Globalization, eds. Axel Körner and Paolo Kuehl, (2021).

‘“A Christy Minstrel, a Harlequin, or an Ancient Persian”?: Opera, Hindustani Classical Music, and the Origins of the Popular South Asian “Musical”’, Theatre Survey, 61:3, (September 2020), 331-350. 

‘Canonizing Impulses, Cartographic Desires and the Legibility of History: Why Speak of/for Indian Theatrical Pasts?’, The Routledge Companion to Theatre Historiography, eds. Tracy Davis and Peter Marx, London and New York: Routledge, 2020, 186-205.

‘What’s in a name?: The Performance of Language in the Invention of Colonial and Postcolonial South Asian Theatre History’, The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography, eds. Claire Cochrane and Joanna Robinson, London: Bloomsbury, 2019, 199-209.

‘Troubling Race: The Eastward Success and Westward Failure of the Parsi theatre’, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, 44:1, doi: 10.1177/1748372717735819

‘The Picture, the Parable, the Performance and the Sword: Secularism’s Demographic Imperatives’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, doi: 10.1080/01419870.2018.1381342

‘From India to India: The Performative Unworlding of Literature’, Theatre Research International, 42:1 (March 2017)

‘Corporeality, Aryanism, Race: the theatre and social reform of the Parsis of Western India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 38.4 (December 2015)

All Affiliates
Dr Jaspal Singh
Honorary Assistant Professor

Dr Jaspal Singh

MA Mainz; MA, PhD Cardiff

Profile

Dr Jaspal Naveel Singh is a sociolinguist and linguistic ethnographer. His PhD thesis explored voice and narrative in hip hop dance, music and art in Delhi, India. Prior to coming to the University of Hong Kong, he taught at Cardiff University in Wales, UK, and at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. He disseminated his research at numerous academic conferences and lectures across the world and through academic publications. Jaspal works ethnographically and is interested in the complex interconnections between language (languaging) and culture (transculturation). He takes inspiration from sociolinguistics, discourse studies, classic western and eastern philosophy, hip hop and other Black diasporic traditions, to arrive at a type of research that complexifies standard approaches in the social sciences and problematises research ethics and common-sense writing strategies.

Publications

Monograph

Singh, Jaspal Naveel (under review) Transcultural Voices: Narrating Hip Hop Culture in Complex Delhi. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Anticipated publication date: April 2021.

 

Journal articles

Dattatreyan, Ethiraj Gabriel and Jaspal Naveel Singh (2020) Ciphers, hoods, and digital DIY studios in urban India: Negotiating aspirational individuality and spatial collectivity. Global Hip Hop Studies 1(1): 25-45. https://doi.org/10.1386/ghhs_00003_1

Singh, Jaspal Naveel (in press) Overstandin: Upscaling reading positions and rescaling texts. Applied Linguistics Review. Ahead of Print: https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2019-0138

Singh, Jaspal Naveel (2020) Loudness registers: Normalising cosmopolitan identities in a narrative of ethnic othering. Journal of Sociolinguistics 24(2): 209-227. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12364

Singh, Jaspal Naveel and Tom Bartlett (2017) Negotiating sustainability across scales: Community organising in the Outer Hebrides. AILA Review 30: 50-71.  https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.00003.sin

Singh, Jaspal Naveel and Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan (2016) Cultural interventions: Repositioning hip hop education in India. Linguistics & Education 36(1): 55-64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2016.05.003

Singh, Jaspal Naveel (2013) ‘How many of us remember 1984?’: Narrating masculinity and militancy in the Khalistani rap bricolage. Sikh Formations. Religion, Culture, Theory 9(3): 339-360. https://doi.org/10.1080/17448727.2013.863061

 

Working Paper

Singh, Jaspal Naveel and Frances Rock (2018) Changing landscapes: Cathays in Cardiff. Working Papers in Translanguaging and Translation (WP.3). https://www.academia.edu/36628991/WP3_Singh_J._N.and_Rock_F._2018_Changing_Landscapes_Cathays_in_Cardiff

 

Editorship

Williams, Quentin and Jaspal Naveel Singh (eds.) (in preparation) Global HipHopography. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Yannik Porsché, Ronny Scholz and Jaspal Naveel Singh (eds.) (in preparation) Institutional Practices and the Making of Political Concerns: Empirical Analyses of Discursivity and Materiality. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Spotti, Massimiliano and Jaspal Naveel Singh (eds.) (in press) Scaling practices in polycentric encounters. Special issue. Applied Linguistics Review.

Singh, Jaspal Naveel, Argyro Kantara and Dorottya Cserző (eds.) (2016) Downscaling Culture: Revisiting Intercultural Communication. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.

 

Book chapters

Singh, Jaspal Naveel (in press) Migration, hip hop and translation zones. In: Tong King Lee (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Translation and the City. London: Routledge.

Singh, Jaspal Naveel (in press) The sociolinguistic saffronisation of India. In: Irene Theodoropoulou and Johanna Tovar (eds.) Research Companion to Language and Country Branding. London: Routledge.

Singh, Jaspal Naveel (2020) Appropriate meaning: Discursive struggle and polyphonic semiosis in Indian hip hop. In: Boris Zizek and Hanna Piepenbring (eds.) Formen der Aneignung des Fremden. Heidelberg: Winter, 129-144.

Singh, Jaspal Naveel (2016) The journey is its own reward: Downscaling culture in intercultural communication research. In: Jaspal Naveel Singh, Argyro Kantara and Dorottya Cserző (eds.) Downscaling Culture: Revisiting Intercultural Communication. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 11-31.

Singh, Jaspal Naveel (2016) Delhi to Bronx: Transkulturelle Historizität als transformatives Potential. In: Heidrun Kämper, Daniel Schmidt-Brücken and Ingo H. Warnke (eds.) Textuelle Historizität: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf das diskursive Apriori. Berlin/Boston: Mouton de Gruyter, 261-284.

Wengoborski, Sonja and Jaspal Naveel Singh (2013) Creating the city of Delhi: Stories of strong women and weak walls. In: Hans-Christian Petersen (ed.) Spaces of the Poor: Perspectives of Cultural Sciences on Urban Slum Areas and Their Inhabitants. Bielefeld: Transcript, 147-168.

 

Reviews

Singh, Jaspal Naveel (2019) Review of Mary Bucholtz, Dolores Inés Casillas and Jin Sook Lee (eds.). Feeling it: Language, Race and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning. Language in Society 48(5): 781-785. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404519000666

Singh, Jaspal Naveel (2018) Review of Andrzej Zuczkowski, Ramona Bongelli and Illaria Riccioni. Epistemic Stance in Dialogue: Knowing, Unknowing, Believing. Discourse Studies 20(3): 445-447. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445618761388a

Singh, Jaspal Naveel (2018) Review of Quentin Williams. Remix Multilingualism: Hip Hop, Ethnography and Performing Marginalized Voices. Journal of Sociolinguistics 22(2): 258-261. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12282

Singh, Jaspal Naveel (2016) Review of Johannes Angermuller, Martin Nonhoff, Eva Herschinger, Felicitas Macgilchrist, Martin Reisigl, Juliette Wedl, Daniel Wrana and Alexander Ziem (eds.). Diskursforschung: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Discourse Studies 18(3): 354-358. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445616634781

Singh, Jaspal Naveel (2015) Review of Johannes Angermuller. Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis: Subjectivity in Enunciative Pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics 88: 55-57. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.08.010

Singh, Jaspal Naveel (2015) Review of Suresh Canagarajah. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19(1): 105-110. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12095