Seminars

Studies in Dance

  • Founded
    2011
  • Seminar Number
    749

Studies in Dance takes a broad, interdisciplinary approach to dance scholarship while serving as an ongoing forum for discussion by established and younger scholars.  The Seminar embraces all forms of dance scholarship, regardless of discipline, research area, and methodology, and has the long-term goal of encouraging academic publication and new research.  The members include Barnard College and Columbia University faculty as well as independent scholars and faculty from other New York institutions, although speakers may come from outside the metropolitan area.

Chair
Professor Lynn Garafola
lg97@columbia.edu

Rapporteurs
Emily Hawk
eah2201@columbia.edu

Anna Waller
a.waller@columbia.edu

All seminars will meet over Zoom for the 2020 fall semester. Meeting links provided upon RSVP. Meeting dates and times are subject to change. 

Meeting Schedule

09/28/2020 Online Meeting
6:00 PM
Dunham's Data
Harmony Bench, Ohio State University

Kate Elswit, University of London (England, UK)
Speaker Link Abstract

Abstract

Dunham’s Data is a three-year project (2018-21) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain (AHRC AH/R012989/1), under the direction of Kate Elswit (PI, University of London, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama) and Harmony Bench (CI, The Ohio State University). Through this project, we explore the kinds of questions and problems that make the analysis and visualization of data meaningful for dance history. We do so through the case study of choreographer Katherine Dunham, manually cataloguing a daily itinerary of Dunham’s touring and travel from the 1930s-60s, the dancers, drummers, and singers in her employ during that time, and the repertory they performed. These curated datasets provide new means to understand the relationships between thousands of locations, and hundreds of performers and pieces across the decades of Dunham's career, and ultimately elaborate how movement moves.
10/26/2020 Online Meeting
2:00 PM
Vertigo and the Revolutionary Body in Modern Europe
Elizabeth Claire, Center for Historical Research (France)
Abstract

Abstract

This chapter concerns the role of the imagination in the pathology of vertigo in the period following the Revolutionary Terror when Napoleonic imperialism was at its zenith. The nationalization of waltz-vertigo as a French dilemma will be contextualized as a gendered socio-political phenomenon allowing physicians and moralists to link women's desires and ambitions [envies] to ancient medical concepts about the powers of the imagination in order to pathologize female empowerment just as bourgeois sociability came to invest new sites of social dancing throughout Europe.
11/23/2020 Online Meeting
6:00 PM

,




12/14/2020 Online Meeting
6:00 PM

,




02/01/2021 Location TBD
6:00 PM

,




03/01/2021 Location TBD
6:00 PM

,




03/29/2021 Location TBD
6:00 PM

,




04/26/2021 Location TBD
6:00 PM

,