IMPR Colloquium Series
The PhD in Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph is a transformative four-year, in-person program that blends rigorous academic research with arts-based community engagement. Centred on improvisation as a catalyst for social change, it fosters innovative scholarship and creative methodologies.
A key milestone in the program, the IMPR Colloquium follows a year of coursework and constitutes a first step toward the Qualifying Examination (QE), typically scheduled at the end of a student’s second year. This forum allows IMPR students to present and refine research with feedback from faculty, peers, and the public. These events are free and open to all—an opportunity to engage with leading-edge ideas in art-based community making and critical studies in improvisation.
IMPR Colloquium Series Archive
- October 21, 2025: Mike Hansen, My First Experience: A Noise
- June 10, 2025: Michael Bergmann, Improvnetics: Post-anthropocentric performance and improvisational modes for human-AI play, or: What we talk about when we talk about Intersentient empathy
- February 21, 2025: Matthew Endahl, A New Burst of Bloom
- November 22, 2023: Joe Sorbara, Attending to the Social Space of The Music: Self-Expression as a Site of Pedagogy | Questioning the ways that I teach creative music making
- November 10, 2023: annais linares, Co-Creative Accompaniment: Improvising Re[new]ed Relationships through Arts-Based Kin Making
- October 30, 2023: Bob Wiseman, The Black Square
- September 13, 2023: Sophie Brown, Improvisation, Pedagogy, and Pre-Texts
(The links above include only the most recent IMPR Colloquiums. In previous years, the IMPR Colloquium Series was a breakout portion of Thinking Spaces: The Improvisation Reading Group and Speaker Series.)
