Fall 2025 Graduate Courses

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 612

Recitation Sections:

PERF-GT 1000.002 - Thursdays, 3:00pm - 4:15pm, Room 612

PERF-GT 1000.003 - Thursdays, 3:00pm - 4:15pm, Room 613

PERF-GT 1000.004 - Thursdays, 3:00pm - 4:15pm, Room 611

This course will introduce incoming Master’s students to some of the concepts, terms, and theoretical genealogies that they can expect to encounter in Performance Studies.  What makes performance studies performance studies, and why do it?  In considering this question we will consider the specificity of performance as an object of study, a mode of inquiry, a practice of self-hood and sociality, and as an aesthetic practice; we will also focus on the specific challenges and potentialities in writing about/as performance.

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 611

Performance Studies PhD students only.

Description to come. 

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 612

Scholars have considered the increasing integration of performance into the visual art world, but one might argue that craft, with its inherent focus on process, was always already, in the words of curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, "inextricably linked to performance." There’s a large bibliography on the politics of craft (much of it focusing on the ways in which gender, race, nation and class determine how cultural production is determined to be “art” or “mere craft”), and in recent years, some scholars have explored the surge in “craftivism” – the mobilizing of craft practices toward ostensibly radical political ends. Students of affect have probed the significance of hapticality in relation to handmade objects. And the fiber arts in particular are often invoked in discussions of writerly technique (encapsulated in the etymological link between text and textiles). We will explore together political, affective and writerly questions raised by the category of craft - and perhaps most importantly, we will use our own craft practices to derive new understandings of the relationship between labor, identity, feeling and writing. Readings will range from Gandhi and Marx to Sedgwick, hooks, Bryan-Wilson, Adamson, and Aram Han Sifuentes, among others. Practice will involve our hands.

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 612

This course will invite students to read about, discuss, and produce performative writing. By performative writing, we refer both to writing that compellingly addresses, conveys and analyses performance practices, and also writing that performs in the world: that is, writing that makes something happen. This latter concept was articulated by the linguistic philosopher J.L. Austin and has been developed and critiqued by subsequent theorists – though as we’ll also see, it’s arguably been both practiced and theorized in other historical and cultural contexts. Through readings and performance/writing exercises, students will explore various formal techniques for writing in a compelling way about the aesthetic and/or conceptual features of a given performance practice; identify some of the specific possibilities and challenges afforded by the current historical moment (including new technologies and the politics of representation) in taking up the question of writing about performance; and define several notions of the performative capacities of writing itself, including spells, poetry, fiction and correspondence. We’ll also consider some of the terms recently coined or invoked to describe such experiments in literary performativity: parafiction, fictocriticism, and autotheory. 

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 613

This course focuses on modern and contemporary entanglements of (in)humanity and materiality, with special attention to instances of art, culture, and material production. We will study processes, contexts and techniques traversing sites and histories of the colony, studio, factory, gallery, home, laboratory and atmosphere. Questions that animate our study may include: How have formal and technical processes constituted and materialized modern concepts of the human, person, animal and thing? What are some ways that artists have linked our material world and materialist conception of history with aesthetic production and phenomenal experience? How has the category of the human been distributed, made to matter – sediment and accrue substance, take shape and form in/as things, bodies and resources, accumulate cultural and political consequence and power? How do manipulations and regulations of materiality, in turn, produce and shape experiences of personhood, objecthood and space? Coursework involves attention to modern sculpture, installation, decorative and craft traditions, process art, environmental intervention, and experimentation across workshops, labs and amateur science across the twentieth and twenty-first century. Readings and objects of the course will be drawn from art history, material culture, cultural economies of colonialism, old and renewed materialisms, affect theory, environmental humanities, histories of labor, science and technology studies. 

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 613

On August 26, 1974 - the same day that Michel Foucault completed Discipline and Punish - he began work on the first volume of the History of Sexuality, drafting that book’s famous final section on the “Right of Death and Power over Life.” This is the section where he first explicitly names and introduces the concept of “bio-power” and also indicates the fatal entanglement of discourses of sexuality in state racism. This seminar is organized around close patient readings of both Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality, both of which we will read in their entirety. We will supplement our engagement of these texts with selected materials from the large and still-emerging inventory of Foucault’s interviews and public lectures, with an eye to questions of resistance and revolt. This seminar is writing-intensive, and enrollment is limited to 15 students.

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 612

In 1994, the Whitney Museum of American Art sponsored a landmark exhibition: “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.” Curated by Thelma Golden, now the Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the show exposed a number of viewers to that complex, troubling figure in American art and literature: the Black male.

As the catalogue’s editor, I was very moved to discover, while reading and working on the essays, all this diversity within the diversity. The cultural critic Greg Tate on Black genius, bell hooks on feminism vis a vis the Black male, Elizabeth Alexander on Rodney King, and Golden herself on her professional and personal relationship to Black masculinity — all important, vibrant voices that contributed to, and changed, the ways in which we looked and did not look at maleness, race, fraternity, fracture.

In “Black Male: James Baldwin Live and On Stage," we will examine the Black male as he's presented in the great American author's criticism, fiction, theatre, and film work. What is it about Baldwin and the Black male's “Africanist presence,” as Toni Morrison has it, that troubles, disturbs, frustrates, and enlightens when it comes to America in general and American theatre and film in particular? Was Baldwin — because of his largely closeted life — he an “invisible man,” or symbolic of violence? Invented, or free?

James Baldwin's first full length play, The Amen Corner, premiered at Howard University in 1955, when the author was thirty years old. By then, Baldwin had published one novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953) and was putting together his seminal book of essays, Notes of A Native Son, which came out later in 1955. While a number of people warned Baldwin about writing a play on the heels of a successful novel — it was too risky financially and otherwise — the author felt compelled to do so; he wanted to help change the American theatre and how it did or didn't represent Black life.

For most of his life and career, Baldwin was drawn not only to the theatre, but to film: in addition to adapting a number of his works for the screen, he hoped to direct as well. (In 1958, the young writer was hired to assist the legendary director Elia Kazan when the latter was steering Archibald MacLeish's JB and Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth, respectively, to their successful Broadway runs). In addition, Baldwin was friends with a number of other artists who, in one way or another, inspired him: playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun; actors Marlon Brando and Geraldine Page; Turkish actor and director Engin Cezzar, and so on.

Nearly after a decade after The Amen Corner was first produced, Baldwin's second play, 1964's Blues for Mr. Charlie, had a brief run on Broadway. Nine years is a long time in the American theatre, and much had changed on the literary and theatrical landscape by the time Blues for Mr. Charlie had come and gone. What were the seismic shifts in the culture that got Blues for Mr. Charlie produced in the first place? Did other theatre artists of color (or women, or gay men) ultimately make a more significant radical contribution to the stage than Baldwin? Again and again, Baldwin wrote about masks and performers. What was he trying to say or not trying to say about the national character through these and other metaphors? What constitutes a Black theatre? And how did Baldwin and his precursors and contemporaries contribute to its making?

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 612

While the diva has always been with us — Thespis, for instance, introduced the first hypocrites, or theatre texts, at the Theatre of Dionysus in the 6th century BC — it was in the 19th century that the female diva or star showgirl became a prominent fixture on the theatrical landscape.

As defined by scholar Dolores McElroy, the female diva is a distinctly modern creation, "born of mechanization and the reaction against it". While she may live in an industrialized society, the diva is remarkable in her individuality, and feeling. And while “diva” is no longer restricted to opera singers, the term has broadened to include, McElroy says, "nearly any woman with a theatrical manner of self-presentation who is narrated as a 'public success'; and a 'private failure'."

In Showgirls, we will of course look at a number of those women, but we will also examine the work of a number of queer male artists and thinkers who have helped move "past" the limits of gender — and who often use language-as-spectacle to increase our understanding of how theatre reflects the everyday even as it seeks to transcend it. Of course, the idea of the diva or showgirl will raise a number of questions about what defines the star on and off the page as well. Is it a bravura style? Do they mirror something about their times, or gender, or both? What is it that they bring to the text (or in making text) that adds to our understanding of the lives we live, or long to? How do they manifest dreams? Or embody what we aspire to in ourselves? 

This course is a seminar; classroom discussion is key.

Non-credit bearing course (0 points), 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 611

Performance Studies PhD students only.

Emphasis on problems of research, writing, and editing as they apply to the doctoral dissertation. Each student will prepare a dissertation proposal as a class project and present it at the end of the semester colloquium.