Matt Jones
Matt Jones, PhD
(he/him)
Lecturer, Performance
Education:
- PhD Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto
- MA English, Concordia University
- BA English and Creative Writing, Concordia University
Email: mattjones@torontomu.ca
Matt Jones is a scholar of Performance Studies and Communication. He is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Graduate Centre for Academic Communication and he has been teaching at the School of Performance since 2021. Matt’s research draws on concepts from theatre and performance studies to devise strategies to help students improve their communication and research practices. He was the recipient of a 2022 UTSC Teaching Award from the University of Toronto Scarborough and he is a Co-Investigator on Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance, a project supported by a Partnership Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.
Matt’s writing has appeared in SubStance, Performance Research, Theatre Journal, Canadian Theatre Review, and Theatre Research in Canada. His journalistic writing has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the Montreal Gazette, This Magazine, Canadian Dimension, and on his blog, Chez le Piment Rouge. His plays include Dracula in a Time of Climate Change, The Mysterious Case of the Flying Anarchist, and the collective creation Death Clowns in Guantánamo Bay. He is currently writing a book about performance in the deathscapes of the War on Terror. For more information, please visit mattjones.space (external link) .
Performance studies, activist performance, creative research, equity-oriented teaching, decolonial and equity-based communication, generative AI in teaching and learning, social justice pedagogy.
2024- Co-Investigator, Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Canadian Performance. Supported by SSHRC Partnership Grant (PDG).
2020-21 Supervisor, Quarantine Performance: Global Responses to COVID-19 in the Performing Arts. With Nae Hanashiro Avila and Sebastian Samur. Funded by University of Toronto Student Engagement Award & Canadian Association for Theatre Research Grant.
Refereed Articles
2023 “On the Ends and Endings of Protest.” With Jimena Ortuzar. Performance Research, vol. 27, nos. 3-4, 2023, pp. 13-25. DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2022.2155391.
2020 “Citizen in Exception: Omar Khadr and the Performative Gap in the Law.” Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada, vol. 41, no. 1, 2020, pp. 88-107. DOI: 10.3138/tric.41.1.88.
2020 “Sarin Gas Heartbreak: Theatre and Post-Truth Warfare in Syria.” Theatre Journal, vol. 72, no. 1, 2020, pp. 61-79. DOI: 10.1353/tj.2020.0005.
2018 “Drunken Language, Elliptical Politics: Caryl Churchill’s Oblique Protest Theatre.” Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre, vol. 5, no. 1, 2018, pp. 11-20. DOI: 10.32920/21948641.
2017 “Vomiting on New Friends: Charlie Hebdo and the Legacy of Anarchic Black Humor in French Comics.” SubStance, vol. 46, no. 2, 2017, pp. 71-94. DOI: 10.1353/sub.2017.0019.
Non-Refereed Articles
2024 “Archiving the Utopian Performative: The Centre Internationaliste Stanley Ryerson.” Gatherings Partnership. https://gatheringspartnership.com/museum-gallery-blog/2024/10/16/archiving-the-utopian-performative-the-centre-internationaliste-stanley-ryerson (external link)
2021 “Editorial: Performance in an Age of Gross Incompetence.” Canadian Theatre Review, no. 185, January 2021. DOI: 10.3138/ctr.185.014.
2018 “Forced Entertainment? Gamified Surveillance in Theatre Conspiracy’s Foreign Radical.” Canadian Theatre Review, no. 175, Summer 2018, pp. 52-56. DOI: 10.3138/ctr.175.010.
2018 “Is This Still That? An Interview with CBC’s Peter Oldring.” Canadian Theatre Review, no. 175, Summer 2018, pp 25-28. DOI: 10.3138/ctr.175.005.
2018 “Editorial: Post-Truth?” Co-authored with Barry Freeman. Canadian Theatre Review, no. 175, Summer 2018, pp. 5-7. DOI: 10.3138/ctr.175.001.
2015 “Towards a Theatre of Global Empathy: Imagining Otherness in the War on Terror.” alt.theatre, vol. 12, no.1, 2015, pp. 10-17. 10.32920/21950399.
2014 “After Kandahar: Canadian Theatre’s Engagement with the War in Afghanistan.” Canadian Theatre Review, no. 157, 2014, pp. 26-29. DOI: 10.3138/ctr.157.006.
Edited Journals
2021 “Views and Reviews: Gross Incompetence.” Canadian Theatre Review, no. 185, Jan. 2021. Link.
2018 Post-Truth? special issue of Canadian Theatre Review, no. 175, Summer 2018. Co-edited with Barry Freeman. L ink.
Manuscripts in Progress
2025 “A Redneck Jihadi in Kabul: The Camouflaged Identities of Aman Mojadidi.” Decolonizing Dramaturgy in Global Context. Bloomsbury. Edited by Magda Romanska. Bloomsbury, 2024.
n.d. “On the Trail of Operation Pacification: Rediscovering the Vietnam-Era Anti-War Archive in Canada.” Performing Ephemera. Edited by Stephen Johnson and Roberta Barker. Playwrights Canada Press (date TBA). (draft in progress)
n.d. Performance in the Deathscapes of the Global War on Terror. Book manuscript. (proposal in progress)
