Welcome to the Centre for Critical and Creative Cultures at the University of Dundee

The Centre is dedicated to exploring the intersections of creativity and criticism in a range of disciplines, contexts and media. The Centre’s work is concerned with inter- and multi-disciplinarity, with multimedia, mixed media and digital and intermedial literary-art works, and with the various forms that knowledge, its presentations and representations, can take. It has specific interests in areas including word and image, film, comics, creative writing, theatre, performance and performativity. Its activities explore both contemporary and historical definitions of creativity and criticism, and their relation to theoretical and philosophical inflections of aesthetics.

The distinction between creative and critical work in the Humanities remains contested. Where there were once thought to be easily perceptible differences between what constitutes academic research and what are identifiable as creative and professional practices, the work of the Centre embraces a blurring of this distinction. Creative criticism, ‘creative’ writing as research, performance philosophy, studio-based research practices, practice(-as-)research, critical curation, and so on, all contribute to a rethinking of the forms of knowledge at stake in both critical and creative work, without simply collapsing one into the other.

Recent publications by Centre members