Dr Mark Flisher
Head of Institute of Arts and Humanities
Institute of Arts and Humanities
Head of School
Senior Leadership Team
email: m.flisher@worc.ac.uk
tel: 01905 54 3461
Mark is the Head of the Institute of Arts and Humanities and is responsible for the leadership of four departments: Theatre, Film and Media Production, History and Sociology, Art and Design Communication, and English, Media and Culture. His remit is to provide strong, creative and effective leadership for the Institute and its staff, ensuring excellence in learning and teaching, research and scholarship, and fostering partnerships across the city and beyond.
He has over two decades of teaching theatre that includes secondary education and Further and Higher Education. He also has a background in experimental theatre and Live Art practice, which has also aligned with his research interests that explore live art and masculinity, practice research and innovative curriculum design for creative arts. He has published research as performance, articles and chapters.
In addition to teaching across Undergraduate and Postgraduate taught causes, Mark has acted as a Supervisor for PhD projects that explore neurodivergence in performance, and theatre as an archive for sexuality. He has also externally assessed research projects that interrogate toxic masculinity though Live Art. Other external roles include being a trustee for arts organisations and providing consultation on student mental health and wellbeing to various educational organisations.
Qualifications
2016: Awarded Senior HEA Senior Teacher Fellowship Accreditation.
2016: PhD ‘Reflections on Leaking Men and Abject Masculinities: Challenging Representations of Male Identity in And Through Body-Based Performance Art’. University of Plymouth.
2010: Master Of Research in Theatre and Performance. Awarded By Plymouth University.
2006: PGCE (Post-16). Awarded by Canterbury Christchurch University.
2001: BAH Drama and Education. Awarded by Manchester Metropolitan University.
Teaching and Research Interests
Mark’s teaching and research interests are closely aligned, and he has a strong focus in the politics of the body and performance. To this end, in his teaching and research he explores not just the ways in which we think about bodies in performance, but also how knowledge can be generated through bodies; how embodying performance techniques and strategies can help us understand artistic lineages, or even challenge what we think we know. This has led Mark down several avenues including autobiographical performance making, One-to-One performance, Performance Art, and queer Live Art practices.
Most recently Mark has also developed an interest in student mental health and wellbeing in Higher Education. In addition to writing and designing an innovative subject-specialist Level 4 wellbeing module in artistic practice, Mark has also written about inclusive curriculum design and has been published in Advance HE’s ‘Embedding Wellbeing into the Curriculum: A Global Compendium of Good Practice.’
Publications
2025: (forthcoming) Flisher M. The Corporeal Kindness of Adrian Howell’s The Pleasure of Being [in] The Routledge Companion for Bodies in Performance (eds) Roberta Mock and Victor Ramírez Ladrón de Guevara. Routledge.
2025: (forthcoming) Roe, S and Mark Flisher. Training for Kindness: Embedding Health and Wellbeing into Performing Arts Curricula [in] Arts education futures: Trends across the globe (Eds) Bernie Andrews.
2020: Flisher, M. Negating Our Social Bonds: Experiencing Shame in Body Art as a Political Act. Contemporary Theatre Review.
2019: Flisher, M. The Generosity of Enemas. Performance Research, 23.5.
2016–18: Flisher, M. Generous Enema.
2015: Flisher, M. Caring/.
2014: Flisher, M. Talking About Keith.
2012–2018: Flisher, M. Spitting Distance.
2012: Bray, O and Mark Flisher. ‘The Speech Maker.’ Performance Studies International #18 Conference, Leeds.
2011–Present: Bray, O and Mark Flisher. The Speech Maker.
External Roles
2023: Peer reviewed chapters for Arts education futures: Trends and directions (to be published).
2023: Peer Reviewer for Studies in Theatre and Performance Journal.
2022: Peer Reviewer for Humanities Journal.
2022: Research Masters Examination at Plymouth University. Charlie Gomforth. A Practice-as-Research Project utilizing Butler’s (1990) Feminist/ Post-structuralist theory of Gender Performativity, as well as Connell's (2001) system of Hegemony, Complicity, and Subordination to Interrogate the Formation of Toxic Masculinity through Live Art, Practice-as-Research and Autoethnographic Methodologies.
2014–2021: Board Member of Compass Live Art Festival. My role on this board was to offer consultancy on Higher Education strategies and support to the Compass Live Art charity in the legal running of that organisation.