Jane Plastow, who has died of cancer aged 66, was an academic and theatre-maker based at the University of Leeds who made invaluable contributions to the fields of community-based theatre, African studies and global development.
Jane led the Centre for African Studies at Leeds from 2004 to 2014, overseeing the innovative theatre and global development MA. In 2006 she was made professor of African theatre, with the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka attending her inaugural lecture.
A pivotal point in Jane’s career came in the 1990s with her long-term projects with Eritrean artists and educators in the aftermath of the war of independence.
Most recently, Jane had a longstanding collaboration with We Are Walukuba, a community group in Jinja, Uganda. Over a decade, Jane and collaborators challenged the dominant short-term and message-based conventions of theatre for development with long-term dialogical forms of artistic engagement. Her experience led to the publication of her two-volume A History of East African Theatre (2020, 2021), followed by Community-Based Arts, Research and Activism in Uganda: We Are Walukuba (2025), and her forthcoming monograph Somali Musical Theatre (2026).
Born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, she was the daughter of Mary (nee Luckett), a legal secretary, and Gerald Plastow, who worked in local government. After attending Tunbridge Wells Girls’ grammar school, Jane completed a BA in English at the University of Manchester in 1981. She then travelled to Africa for the first time, undertaking a teaching post in the Gambia. This job would mark the beginning of a 44-year collaborative relationship with African artists, activists and educators traversing many countries including Kenya, Sudan, Tanzania, Somaliland, Djibouti and Zimbabwe.
After her time in the Gambia, Jane became a lecturer at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, for three years. She then completed an MPhil and a PhD at Manchester, before moving to the Ulster University at Coleraine in 1991 to lecture in theatre studies, and then to Leeds in 1994.
Jane acted as PhD supervisor for many students, many of whom went on to hold senior positions at leading African universities.
In her years after her cancer diagnosis, Jane became interested in growing authoritarianism in the UK when her son, Will, was arrested for pro-Palestinian activism. Her uncompleted final book, provisionally titled Keir Starmer’s Political Prisoners, consisted of interviews with British political prisoners, and highlighted the increasingly severe state crackdown on dissent in the UK.
Jane was a collaborator who truly believed, inhabited and realised the political power of the arts. She had an unrelenting and unstoppable energy and an enormous sense of fun.
She is survived by Will, her brother, John, and sisters Beverley and Caroline.
