Kemal Sultanov

I am a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of English, Cambridge. My project, provisionally entitled 'Philosophy in Rehearsal, 1950s-1980s', examines the changing relations between philosophical and theatrical praxes in this thirty-year period to show how the theatrical rehearsal emerges as a mode of philosophical inquiry across a number of traditions of (loosely) ‘continental’ thought. Running counter to conceptions of this period as one which understands philosophical thought as a linguistic, semiological and/or poetic procedure bound to the text of philosophy, this project attempts to recover a parallel history of embodied, collective practices of philosophical thinking, as they emerge from rehearsal rooms in New York, London, Paris and Berlin. It considers a range of theatre-philosophical experiments that have remained absent from intellectual histories of this period and reconsiders some more well-known theatre practitioners as part of this philosophical history; its central figures are Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean Genet, Heiner Müller, Samuel Beckett and a number of their shared collaborators. This project is co-funded by an OOC-AHRC-DTP Doctoral Award and a Møller Studentship from Churchill College, Cambridge. I am also a Cambridge Trust Scholar, having retained a Cambridge International Scholarship in an honorary capacity.

I came to Cambridge as a mature student to read for a BA in English and remained there to complete an MPhil in English Studies. Prior to this, I trained and worked extensively as a stage director in the UK, Russia and Central Asia. I am therefore actively interested in stimulating the exchange between performance practitioners and performance researchers, and in practice-led research more generally.