BiblioVault - Books about Nereson, Ariel

Critical University Studies and Performance

Edited by Noe Montez and Ariel Nereson

Vanderbilt University Press, 2026

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.

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Democracy Moving

Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past

Ariel Nereson

University of Michigan Press, 2022

On the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, renowned choreographer and director Bill T. Jones developed three tributes: Serenade/The Proposition, 100 Migrations, and Fondly Do We Hope . . . Fervently Do We Pray. These widely acclaimed dance works incorporated video and audio text from Lincoln’s writings as they examined key moments in his life and his enduring legacy. Democracy Moving explores how these works provided both an occasion and a method by which democracy and history might be reconceived through movement, positioning dance as a form of both history and historiography.

The project addresses how different communities choose to commemorate historical figures, events, and places through art—whether performance, oratory, song, statuary, or portraiture—and in particular, Black US American counter-memorial practices that address histories of slavery. Advancing the theory of oscillation as Black aesthetic praxis, author Ariel Nereson celebrates Bill T. Jones as a public intellectual whose practice has contributed to the project of understanding America’s relationship to its troubled past. The book features materials from Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s largely unexplored archive, interviews with artists, and photos that document this critical stage of Jones’s career as it explores how aesthetics, as ideas in action, can imagine more just and equitable social formations.

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Theatre History Studies 2024, Vol 43

Edited by Jocelyn L. Buckner

University of Alabama Press, 2025

The official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference

Where past and performance converge—scholarship that moves the stage forward.

Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC), a regional body devoted to theatre scholarship and practice. The conference encompasses the states of Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. The purpose of the conference is to unite persons and organizations within the region with an interest in theatre and to promote the growth and development of all forms of theatre. THS is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and is included in the MLA Directory of Periodicals. THS is indexed in Humanities Index, Humanities Abstracts, Book Review Index, MLA International Bibliography, International Bibliography of Theatre, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, IBZ International Bibliography of Periodical Literature, and IBR International Bibliography of Book Reviews. Full texts of essays appear in the databases of both Humanities Abstracts Full Text as well as SIRS.

Along with books reviews on the latest publications from established and emerging voices in the field, this issue of Theatre History Studies contains four sections with two introductions, nine essays, and eleven book reviews total. In the general section, three essays offer an array of insights, methods, and provocations. In the special section titled “Manifestos for Black Theatre, Then and Now,” contributors capture their moment, their ways of working, and their experience as scholars, humans, and citizens in 2023. In part III, Ariel Nereson’s Robert A. Schanke Research Award-winning paper from the 2023 MATC conference examines collective dance histories through the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s Continuous Replay. Taken together, volume 43 captures how this journal serves theatre historians as scholars and laborers as they work to attend and tend to their field.

CONTRIBUTORS

Daniel E. Atkinson / Ashlyn K. Barnett / David Bisaha / Jocelyn L. Buckner / Julie Burrell / Jordana Cox / Jordan Ealey / Eric M. Glover / Adam Goldstein / Chao Guo / Amy B. Huang / Ariel Nereson / Zachary F. Price / Danielle Rosvally / Letica L. Ridley / Bradford G. Sadler / Richard Sautter / Michael Schweikardt / Margo Skornia / Dennis Sloan / Josh Stenberg / Paul Michael Thomson / Scott Venters / Isaiah Matthew Wooden

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