Visiting Scholars
Visiting scholars come to NYU Performance Studies from all over the world to conduct independent research with our faculty members. During their residencies, visiting scholars give informal talks on their research, audit graduate courses, and meet with faculty to receive feedback on their research. If you are interested in becoming a visiting scholar with the department, please complete the application at the following link.
Requirements & Common Requests:
- Please note that space is limited and we can only host up to four scholars a year, and we only accept applicants who have recieved their Ph.D.
- Applicants must confirm a faculty sponsor before applying. Faculty must be in residence for the entire visitation period, not on any sort of leave or sabbatical
- Applications must be submitted a minimum of 6 months prior to the requested period of time.
- Complete applications including the PDF linked above, a CV, an a research statement should be emailed to the Department Administrator, Nicole Cusick.
- Initial applications cannot exceed a one year window of visitation, extensions can be granted but the department cannot support more than one year in an initial application.
- PS faculty can only support one scholar per academic year.
- Applicants looking to secure grant/funding/Fulbright before formally applying can request a letter from the PS Department Administrator confirming that the Department of Performance Studies supports their visiting scholar application, but they can NOT provide documentation/guarantee the appointment without the formal application being approved.
- Applicants are responsible to find their own housing accommodations. NYU does not provide or aid visiting scholars in securing housing.
2023-2024 Visiting Scholars
Lauren Mancia
Lauren Mancia is an Associate Professor of History at Brooklyn College (CUNY) and an Associate Professor of Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is also a lecturer on staff at The Met Cloisters. Mancia holds a PhD From Yale, an MA from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and a BA from Columbia. A scholar of medieval Christian monasticism, she is the author of two books, Meditation and Prayer in the Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastery: Struggling Towards God (2023) and Emotional Monasticism: Affective Piety in the Eleventh-Century Monastery of John of Fécamp (2019); she has also authored many articles about devotional experience and the history of emotion in medieval Europe. As a Visiting Scholar in Performance Studies at NYU from 2023-24, Mancia is thinking about how scholars might better understand medieval religious experience using tools of Performance Studies, and, especially, how she might better communicate her ideas about medieval religion to contemporary audiences through performance and curated experiences.
Maria Jose Arjona
Maria José Arjona is a Colombian multidisciplinary performance artist whose work proposes through radical poetic gestures a unique form of political resistance. At a time when political art is understood primarily as political activism, Arjona instead treats the body as a site for subtle and complex rearticulations and questionings of normative conditioning and violence. She moves away from a focus on the identity of the artist to highlight the organic, expansive shared potential of the body, a body that in its centrality may not be individual or biographical, but collective and unconditioned.
Rosa Lambert
Rosa Lambert (she/her) is a Fulbright postdoctoral research fellow. She holds a PhD in Theater Studies and Intermediality from the University of Antwerp (Belgium), where she graduated in December 2023 with her thesis titled “Moving With(in) Language: Kinetic Textuality in Contemporary Performing Arts.” This study centers around the interaction between (spoken) text and (choreographed) movement in contemporary theatre and dance performances. During her stay at the NYU as a Visiting Scholar, she will research the archives of Judson Poets’ Theater, with the aim of uncovering the similarities between the literary-choreographic aesthetic of this New York-based collective and the re-emergence of cross-connections between literature and dance in contemporary performance. Her scholarly interests include text-based theater and dance, the contemporary and historical intersections between literature and choreography, and (post)phenomenological approaches towards language. Her work has been published in Documenta, Critical Stages/Scènes Critiques, and European journal of theatre and performance.