This chapter offers two examples from university arts education in which performance practice intervenes in, or interrupts, academic learning. Each example is carefully selected to demonstrate the various ways in which modernist theatre can be engaged within a cultural education to combine an interdisciplinary approach with ideas from queer studies. Ultimately, I argue that students benefit from a sustained creative engagement with modernism (and its variants) in order to develop a holistic approach to knowledge-making, academic literacy and queer studies. To reimagine an alternative future for the arts, I reach back to the queer past and invite the ghost of Federico Garcia Lorca (1898–1936) to haunt the modern-day university campus. This essay is underpinned by two accounts of performance practice within a research-intensive university: (1) a new version of Play without a Title by David Johnston, produced by Fail Better Productions at the University of Warwick, transferring to the Belgrade Theatre Coventry (2008); and (2) a workshop process exploring After Lorca by Jack Spicer at the same university, in consultation with Spicer scholar Daniel Katz, by the Warwick Student Ensemble (2012). Finally, there is reflection on ‘haunted practices’ in the interdisciplinary environment that emerged at Warwick Arts Centre (2014–19). The essay itself will move between an academic and a practitioner voice – a disruption that will be marked by the use of italics and the present tense for practice – and each section makes creative use of a different translation of Lorca's line from Play without a Title, ‘Aqui no estamos en el teatro’, as variously: ‘We’re not in the theatre here’ (Bauer, 1983), ‘We aren't in the theatre here’ (Edwards, 1994) and ‘This is not the theatre’ (Johnston, 2008). These shifts in translation influence the form and content of each section and remind the reader of the multiple transmissions between literary modernism and live performance. The essay also makes playful and poetic use of the concepts of ghosting and haunting in theatre practice, as a way of thinking through the practitioner's methods of transmitting text through performance.