Susan Manning is a dance historian and Professor of English and Theatre at Northwestern University where she holds joint appointments in the English Department and Performance Studies. [1] She is currently chair of English at Northwestern. [2] Her first book, Ecstasy and the Demon, won the 1994 de la Torre Bueno Prize, while her second book, Modern Dance Negro Dance, received an Honorable Mention as Outstanding Publication from the Congress on Research in Dance. Manning has been the president of the Society of Dance History Scholars and is the convener for the Chicago Seminar on Dance and Performance. [2]
Manning graduated from Harvard College with a B.A. in 1978 (student-designed major in dance studies), and her Ph.D. from Columbia University (in 1987) in a cross-departmental program between English and Theatre. [3]
Susan Howe is an American poet, scholar, essayist and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among other poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre. Many of Howe's books are layered with historical, mythical, and other references, often presented in an unorthodox format. Her work contains lyrical echoes of sound, and yet is not pinned down by a consistent metrical pattern or a conventional poetic rhyme scheme.
Pearl Eileen Primus was an American dancer, choreographer and anthropologist. Primus played an important role in the presentation of African dance to American audiences. Early in her career she saw the need to promote African dance as an art form worthy of study and performance. Primus' work was a reaction to myths of savagery and the lack of knowledge about African people. It was an effort to guide the Western world to view African dance as an important and dignified statement about another way of life.
Mary Wigman was a German dancer and choreographer, notable as the pioneer of expressionist dance, dance therapy, and movement training without pointe shoes. She is considered one of the most important figures in the history of modern dance. She became one of the most iconic figures of Weimar German culture and her work was hailed for bringing the deepest of existential experiences to the stage.
Katherine Mary Dunham was an American dancer, choreographer, creator of the Dunham Technique, author, educator, anthropologist, and social activist. Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers in African-American and European theater of the 20th century, and directed her own dance company for many years. She has been called the "matriarch and queen mother of black dance."
Performance studies is an interdisciplinary academic field that uses performance as a lens and a tool to study the world. The term performance is broad, and can include artistic and aesthetic performances like concerts, theatrical events, and performance art; sporting events; social, political and religious events like rituals, ceremonies, proclamations and public decisions; certain kinds of language use; and those components of identity which require someone to do, rather than just be, something. According to Mary S. Strine, Beverly W. Long, and Mary Frances HopKins, "scholars in interpretation and performance... recognize and expect disagreement not only about the qualities that make a performance "good" or "bad" in certain contexts, but also about what activities and behaviors appropriately constitute performance and not something else." Consequently, performance studies is an interdisciplinary field, drawing from theories and methods of the performing arts, anthropology, sociology, literary theory, cultural studies, speech communication, and others.
Susan Keating Glaspell was an American playwright, novelist, journalist and actress. With her husband George Cram Cook, she founded the Provincetown Players, the first modern American theatre company.
Mary Zimmerman is an American theatre and opera director and playwright from Nebraska. She is an ensemble member of the Lookingglass Theatre Company, the Manilow Resident Director at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, and also serves as the Jaharis Family Foundation Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.
William Orman Beeman is an American scholar whose specialty is the Middle East; he is a professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, where he is Chair of the Department of Anthropology. He has authored many articles and fourteen books on Iranian politics, theatre, language, and culture.
Sandra M. Gilbert is an American literary critic and poet who has published in the fields of feminist literary criticism, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic criticism. She is best known for her collaborative critical work with Susan Gubar, with whom she co-authored, among other works, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Madwoman in the Attic is widely recognized as a text central to second-wave feminism. She is Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis.
E. Patrick Johnson is the incoming dean of the Northwestern University School of Communication. He is the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and Professor of African-American Studies at Northwestern University. He currently serves as the Chair of the African-American Studies Department at Northwestern University and is a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Johnson is the Founding Director of the Black Arts Initiative at Northwestern. His scholarly and artistic contributions focus on Performance Studies, African-American Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
The de la Torre Bueno Prize is an annual award offered by the Dance Studies Association for the best book published in English in the field of dance studies. The award honors José Rollin de la Torre Bueno, the first university press editor to develop a dance studies titles list. The award of $1000 recognizes exemplary scholarship and important contributions to the field.
Lynn Theresa Garafola is an American dance historian, linguist, critic, curator, lecturer, and educator. A prominent researcher and writer with broad interests in the field of dance history, she is acknowledged as the leading expert on the Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev (1909–1929), the most influential company in twentieth-century theatrical dance.
Dr. Nadine George-Graves is the Chair of the Department of Dance and a Professor since 2018 in both that department and the Department of Theatre at The Ohio State University's Department of Dance and a member of the Dance Research Journal Editorial Board. She holds a PhD in Theater and Drama from Northwestern University and a BA in Philosophy and Theater Studies from Yale University.
Fiona Macintosh is Professor of Classical Reception at the University of Oxford, Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, Curator of the Ioannou Centre, and a Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford.
Susan Bennett is a Canadian Professor of English in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Calgary.
Marlis Erica Schweitzer is a Canadian theatre and performance historian. She is an associate professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre at York University.
Deanne Williams is a Canadian author and literary scholar. She is a Professor in York University's Department of English. A pioneer in early modern Girls' studies, she has published research on Shakespeare's girl characters and girl performers in medieval and early modern England, as well as on the influence of French culture on English literature.
Ayanna Thompson is Professor of English at Arizona State University and Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). She is the president of the Shakespeare Association of America. She specialises in Renaissance drama and issues of race in performance.
Vera Skoronel, born Vera Laemmel, was a Swiss-born German dancer and choreographer.
Erika Thimey was a German dancer and dance educator, based for most of her career in Washington, D.C.