Critical University Studies and Performance explores how we contend with issues of power, race, class, and gender in higher education, specifically as they relate to the complexities of theater and performance studies programs. In what ways might the fields of theater, performance, and dance studies, as they operate in institutions of higher education, support hegemonic logics as well as model reparative practices, given their perhaps unique disciplinary relationships to staging representation and their shared emphasis on embodiment as a practical and theoretical area of engagement? Montez and Nereson bring together scholars with a diverse range of career experiences and embodied positions inside of higher learning in order to deepen the field’s theoretical inquiry using an ethnic studies framework. By participating in the interdisciplinary discourse of critical university studies, the volume aims to explore how to conduct ethical research that critiques the university while remaining mindful of our always contingent place within it. The contributors examine the ways that the university commodifies minoritarian knowledge, tokenizes the arts, and reproduces inequality. The volume offers strategic ways to build liberatory communities and revolutionary networks among students and faculty alike in order to envision futures within and beyond the academy.

Noe Montez is an associate professor of theater at Emory University. He is the author of Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. He is the co-editor of Nothing to Do with Love: and Other Plays by Santiago Loza and the Routledge Companion to Latinx Theatre and Performance. He is the former editor of Theatre Topics.

Ariel Nereson is an associate professor of dance studies and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She is the author of Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past, as well as numerous essays about movement-based performance, race, and embodiment in the United States. Her research has been recognized most recently with the Sally Banes Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research. She is co-editor of Theatre Journal as well as a practicing choreographer and dramaturg.

List of Contributors

Introduction | Noe Montez and Ariel Nereson

Part I: Embodiment
Chapter 1: On Embodied Solidarity | Shelby Brewster
Chapter 2: A Movement Toward Liberation: The Progression of Theater Programs at Historically Black College and Universities | Khalid Y. Long
Chapter 3: Improvising Abolition: Dance, Decarceration, and Higher Education | Hannah Schwadron

Part II: Academic Labor
Chapter 4: Revising TDPS PhD Programs to Support Career Diversity Without Losing Your Soul: Strategies for Incorporating Humanist-Forward Curriculum Revision, Interdisciplinary Learning, and the Public Humanities | Noe Montez and Danielle Rosvally
Chapter 5: Challenge Inaccessibility: A Worklist for the TDPS Job Market | Samuel Yates
Chapter 6: Are Faculty Employees? The Potential for Human Resources as an Ally | Charlotte M. Canning

Part III: Pedagogies of Justice
Chapter 7: Making Space in the Curriculum: Centering Non-Western Epistemologies | Anita Gonzalez
Chapter 8: Bricks as Memory: Embodied Understandings of Racialized University Landscapes in the US South | Cortland Gilliam, Tommy Noonan, and Elizabeth Olson
Chapter 9: “Performance as Monument”: An Interview with Marisa Williamson | Ariel Nereson
Chapter 10: Theater of the Anatomical Theater | Marisa Williamson

Part IV: Public Facing Engagements
Chapter 11: Defund the Season | Henry Bial
Chapter 12: “Institutional Change Is for Suckers”: Higher Education and the Performance of Land Acknowledgments | Bethany Hughes
Chapter 13: Can the University Speak? | Michelle Liu Carriger