Theatre Chair is Distinguished Visitor at the University of Alberta

Dr. Lynne Conner, chair of the Department of Theatre, has been named a Distinguished Visitor at the University of Alberta at Edmonton, one of Canada’s premiere research universities. She will visit the campus for five days, giving a keynote Town and Gown address to the university and Edmonton arts community on September 16 as well as a series of smaller talks throughout the following week. The Distinguished Visitor program at the University of Alberta is a highly competitive, peer-reviewed internal grant program operated out of the Office of the Vice President for Research.

Dr. Conner’s work in the field of audience studies/research has been widely cited around the globe. She was recently called one of the two “foremost figures in the development of thinking about audience engagement and enrichment. As a theatre and dance historian and cultural policy theorist, Conner has produced a significant body of work dedicated to audience research, including her highly influential monograph, Audience engagement and the role of arts talk in the digital era.” (Ben Walmsley, Audience Engagement in the Performing Arts: A Critical Analysis, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 36).

Dr. Conner is one of four editors for the forthcoming 500-page Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts, a prestige reference work providing an overview of the field of audience research that both surveys the discipline and includes emerging/cutting edge areas (publication date 2021), and serves on the international advisory board for the forthcoming Routledge Theatre & Performance Series in Audience Research.