The abstracts are available here.
Information about our keynote speakers is available here.
You can also download a PDF version of the programme here.
Thursday, 4 June 2026
9:00-15:30 PhD Forum (venue: Room 111, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Palachovo nám. 2)
Chairs: Clare Wallace, Leila Vaziri
Participants: Claudia Maya Prats, Hannah Eder, Wiebke Acton, Onur Karaköse, Laura Meyer, Tomáš Eštok
(15:30-17:30 CDE Board Meeting)
16:00-18:00 Arrival and Registration
18:00-19:00 Dinner
19:00-19:30 Conference Opening and CDE Award Presentation
Kerstin Schmidt (President of CDE), Ondřej Pilný, Clare Wallace
19:30-20:30 Keynote 1 – Alice Koubová
20:45 Conference Warming
Friday, 5 June 2026
9:00-10:30 Panel 1 – Resources and Ecologies (chair: tba)
Robert Lublin, Recovery and Resilience in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful
Nicole Schneider, The Resilience of Water: Place, Endurance, and Water in Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s cullud wattah (2021) and Rob Florence’s Katrina: Mother-in-Law of ’em All (2018)
Harriet Carnevale, “Wild as gorse, tough as heather”: Land, Myth and Resilience in Stranger Beasts
10:30-11:00 Coffee break
11:00-12:30 Panel 2 – Contemporary UK Theatre (chair: tba)
Ruud van den Beuken, The Resilience of Radical Hope in Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s Death of England Trilogy
Eva Ries, Promiscuous Obedience as Resilient Resistance in Alice Birch’s Revolt. She said. Revolt Again
Muammer Özoltulular, Staging Relational Resilience in Flora Wilson Brown’s The Beautiful Future is Coming
12:30-14:00 Lunch
14:00-15:00 Panel 3 – Race (chair: tba)
Ahlam Jodat Maodah, The Resilience of Silence: Submissive Performance and the Reclamation of Voice in Cesi Davidson’s ‘Voice Lessons’
Michael Jaros, Feeding Beatrice: Hunger, Property, and Black Ownership in the Contemporary American Theatre
15:00-15:30 Coffee
15:30-16:30 Keynote 2 – Playwright in Conversation: Louise Lowe
19:30 Theatre performance at Divadlo Komedie (optional)
Saturday, 6 June 2026
9:00-10:30 Panel 4 – Spaces of Performance, Spaces of Neoliberalism (chair: tba)
Sarah Heinz, A Dream House on Stage: Inhabiting Resilience in Geoff Sobelle’s Home
Charlotte Farrell, To Hold What Shimmers: The Resilience of Queer Performance in Sydney
Eamonn Jordan, Coping in Conor McPherson’s The Brightening Air
10:30-11:00 Coffee
11:00-12:00 Keynote 3 – Tony Fisher, Necro Theatre: Staging Resilience in the Age of Capitalist Melancholia
12:00-13:00 Lunch
13:00-14:30 Panel 5 – Contested Histories and Alternative Networks (chair: tba)
Kristýna Ilek, Networks of Care: Dramaturgy, Resilience and Power on the Island of Ireland
Chengyao Ye, Staging Hitler: Resilience, Resistance, and the Politics of Contemporariness in British Theatre since the 1990s to the Present
Tomáš Kačer, Red Tape Resilience: Deconstructing a Dominant Historical Discourse in Tracy Letts’s The Minutes
14:30-15:00 Coffee
15:00-16:00 Keynote 4 – Playwright in Conversation: Deirdre Kinahan
16:15-18:45 CDE Annual General Meeting and Election
Sunday, 7 June 2026
9:00-10:00 Keynote 5 – Miriam Haughton, What Is Happening to Art? Theatre Finance, Funding, and Policy in the Twenty-first Century
10:00-10:30 Coffee
10:30-12:00 Panel 6 – Disenfranchisement and Resistance (chair: tba)
Edyta Lorek-Jezińska, The Risks of Making Tea and Advantages of Murder: Resilience, Resistance and Counterfeit Disability in Rob Drummond’s Don’t. Make. Tea. (2022/24)
Diana Benea, Performing Resilience in Ping Chong + Company’s Community-Based Productions with Refugees
Douglas Basford, “What Progress?”: Performing Resilience in Public Enemy: Flint
12:00-13:30 Lunch (optional)
13:30 End of Conference
The conference is supported by the European Regional Development Fund project “Beyond Security: The Role of Conflict in Resilience-Building” (reg. no.: CZ.02.01.01/00/22_008/0004595) and the ESP Programme of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Ireland.