Meet Professor Teresa Murjas

Professor Teresa Murjas uses archival materials, artefacts and oral testimony as part of her creative practice. She collaborates with museums and galleries, and theatre and film practitioners, in order to make and publicly show her mixed-media projects. 

Teresa's research originally stems from her decision to share stories about her family history through performance making. Her work is informed by her family's experiences of wartime displacement.

Teresa's performance, Surviving Objects, made use of her family archive, and it led to her exciting web-based project entitled War Child. 

She was invited by the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) in Reading to find a creative new way of engaging diverse audiences with MERL's vast Evacuee Archive. The Archive contains materials relating to the experiences of UK-based child evacuees during World War II and is one of the largest of its kind. 

Teresa met with the Evacuee Archive's originator, Martin Parsons, and discovered that much of the material held in the Archive was collected through his meetings and interviews with former evacuees.

It turned out that Teresa's conversations with Martin, and with members of his family, were so revealing and intriguing that they eventually led her to come up with the idea for an interlinked online resource. She audio-recorded and edited these new conversations, making them absolutely central to her storytelling. 

In order to encourage Martin to tell her his stories, she used a small group of archival objects to act as "triggers". She also threaded information throughout the website about the many journeys she made in her VW Beetle to meet with Martin to talk about war.

A strategy that Teresa has used in many of her projects is incorporating macro-lens video footage of objects and archival materials, so that the viewer can encounter them in unexpected ways. 

This approach to filming can intimately reveal textures and details that aren't visible in the same way to the naked eye. You can find many images like this in War Child. 

In order to produce this material, Teresa has collaborated with undergraduate and PhD students and alumni from the Department of Film, Theatre & Television, including Dr Reina-Marie Loader and, for the War Child project, Dr James Rattee, both of whom are now very successful independent filmmakers.

Teresa convenes the first-year undergraduate module Making Meaning, and her expertise and experience inform how it is taught. Students on this module have been tasked with creating a film and a performance, both of which engage with the theme of conflict. 

Visiting theatremakers and filmmakers have also been involved in delivering the module, giving students expert insights into how they explore similar themes in their work. 

Representing Conflict on Stage and Screen and World Theatres are third-year modules. Both have focused on, for example, a range of contemporary performances and films that address themes associated with conflict. These have included armed combat, human rights, post-conflict reconciliation, forced migration and war memorialisation.