New Opportunities, New Challenges: Graduate Studies in the Context of a New Institutional Paradigm for the Arts and Sciences in Chile

What is it about?

At the end of 2012, the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (UC) established the first Chilean PhD program in Theatre Studies. In March of 2013, this program welcomed its first intake of PhD students in the context of a broader interdisciplinary initiative that also brings together music and visual arts. The fact that Chilean theatre-makers and artists have been trained for more than seventy-five years in specialized academic departments embedded in the university system led to this new graduate program offering both practice-led and theoretical models for students’ research projects.1 Our essay explores the leading role that this graduate program and its institutional background plays in nurturing a new context for artistic practice and research in the local cultural landscape. And, as Marvin Carlson might put it, today this landscape is haunted by hopes and fears, anxieties and misunderstandings (96) induced both by history and by the establishment of two new ministries as part of the Chilean government: the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage (2017), and the Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge, and Innovation (2018). When the country’s elite increasingly promotes the creative industries discourse replacing the arts and humanities as autonomous disciplines with an end in themselves, what role could a PhD program in theatre studies play? What clashes could there be between the public policies generated by these ministries and the Chilean tradition developed by university theatre companies embedded in university departments? Or, following Shannon Jackson’s argument in Professing Performance, how can we honor our history? (40). With the following piece we wish to articulate these questions further

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