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

PS PhD students only

In this course, we’ll be considering our respective research goals and considering some of the better (or worse) ways to pursue them.  Given the disciplinary promiscuity of performance studies, of course, our projects, goals, and means of pursuit will be widely varied; for that reason the course will be largely geared toward workshopping students’ individual projects, while tracking some of the bigger conversations on “method” taking place, and considering some of the more widely-used research methods.

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

In his seminal essay, "Techniques of the Body" (1934), Marcel Mauss argued that "man's first and most natural technical object, and at the same time technical means, is his body." The essay goes on to argue that all bodily practices, even those that we consider "natural" (sitting, walking, sleeping, copulating) are in fact technical, and learned. Some three decades later, a group of dance innovators often subsumed under the rubric "postmodern" turned to precisely these techniques of the body in order to explore their choreographic possibilities. This course will focus on “everyday” movement practices in both quotidian and theatrical settings. Drawing from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, affect studies, feminist and queer theory, as well as recent reconsiderations of postmodern dance's interventions, the course will invite students to consider the significance of the seemingly “normal” and inconsequential nature of such dances. What happens when what is “second nature” becomes the focus of our attention? The course will also place particular emphasis on writing as a mode of illuminating and interrogating the aesthetics of the “everyday”, as well as considering it as a performance practice in and of itself.

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 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 1959, a then thirty-five year old James Baldwin, worked as an assistant and sort of apprentice to the great stage director, Elia Kazan, who had made his name helming classics such as Tennesee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1947) and Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" (1949). In these and other works, Kazan brought a heightened sense of emotional realism to the stage; an "actor's director," he paid particular attention to the ways the performer's interior reality might be reflected through the character's own.

By the time Baldwin began working with Kazan, he had published two novels--"Go Tell It On the Mountain" (1952) and "Giovanni's Room" (1955)--and the classic essay collection, "Notes of a Native Son" (1955). In each, Baldwin had not only written about the Black experience--and, indirectly, queerness--but the legacy of the South: what Black Americans bought with them, and encountered in the North. (Baldwin was born in Harlem Hospital in 1924.) 

He also had a great interest in the stage. In 1954, Baldwin's first full length play, "The Amen Corner," was produced at Howard University. Working with Kazan was not only a way of learning the mechanics of theatre, but how to expand his vision in order to test its parameters.

The play Baldwin and Kazan worked on in 1959 was by Mississippi born Tennessee Williams (1911--1971). Titled "Sweet Bird of Youth," it starred Geraldine Page and Paul Newman as a fading movie star, and hopeful actors on the make.

Set in a small town, the drama, Williams' eighth on Broadway, described the vicissitudes of show business--and a society founded on violence. In his essay on Page, Baldwin describes the art of acting as being essentially "ineffable"--something he cannot describe. Still, we can see Page and Newman's work in the 1962 watered down film version, which retains some of that historic Broadway production's vitality.

Even though Baldwin and Williams only crossed professional paths once, their work expressed similar concerns: man's injustice to man, the marginalization of queer life in what Williams called these Disunited States.

In "Dirty South," we will examine the early American theatre that fostered Baldwin and William's  interest in the form, and their interest, too, in community on and off the stage. In addition to reading primary works by both authors, we will read those artists, ranging from Chekov to Eugene O'Neill, and  Arthur Miller to Lorraine Hansberry, among others, who inspired Baldwin and Wiliams to make the drama not only political, but reflective of their epoch. 

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.