Kate Elswit
Contact:
Office Hours:
by appointmentOVERVIEW:
Kate Elswit is an academic and dancer whose research on performing bodies combines dance history, performance studies theory, German cultural studies, and experimental practice. In 2009, she received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge and joined the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford University, where she taught in the Department of Drama and the Division of Dance. She is currently a Lecturer in German Studies at Stanford University, and Visiting Faculty in Critical Studies at CalArts. She has won two major awards for scholarly publications: the Gertrude Lippincott Award from the Society of Dance History Scholars for her 2009 essay in TDR: The Drama Review, and the Biennial Sally Banes Publication Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research for her 2008 Modern Dramaessay. Her articles have also appeared in Performance Research and Art Journal, with a new essay forthcoming in the edited collection New German Dance Studies from University of Illinois Press. At present, she is finishing the manuscript for Watching Weimar Dance (forthcoming Oxford UP).
Between 2006-2009, she taught practical and theoretical courses in the graduate school at Laban, as well as interdisciplinary undergraduate topics at the University of Cambridge. She was also on the commission for Germany's first practice-led masters degree in dance. As a practitioner she has danced professionally and her choreographic work has appeared in solo performances and festivals in the USA and Europe. She is on the editorial board for Dance Theatre Journal.
Forthcoming 2012, University of Illinois Press
“Back Again? Valeska Gert's Exiles”
TDR/The Drama Review, 53.1 (2009), 73–92
“‘Berlin . . . Your Dance Partner is Death’”
*Winner of the Gertrude Lippincott Award from the Society of Dance History Scholars for best English-language article published in dance studies in 2009
Modern Drama, 51.3 (2008), Theatre and Medicine, 389–410
“The Some of the Parts: Prosthesis and Function in Bertolt Brecht, Oskar Schlemmer, and Kurt Jooss”
*Winnner of the Biennial Sally Banes Publication Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research for best book or article to explore the intersections of dance/movement and theatre between 2007-2008
Performance Research, 13.1 (2008), On Choreography, 61–69
“Petrified? Some Thoughts on Practical Research and Dance Historiography”
EDUCATION:
Courses
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GERGEN174/274Aut2011-12
Technological visions of the human from Romanticism through the present. How has human function been reconceptualized over the past 200 years? Nineteenth-century machinic figures as frightening but offering new social possibilities; the new human type of the early twentieth century; and contemporary explorations of the posthuman. Topics include work by Hoffmann, Kleist, Brecht, Lang, Junger, Kraftwerk, and Chaos Computer Club. In English.
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GERGEN177/277Spr2011-12
Bertold Brecht's 1939 play Mother Courage and her Children opens us to ask how performances enact history, act upon it, and offer access. The first unit historicizes Mother Courage through primary texts and secondary sources. The second thinks critically about archiving and how we ask cultural artifacts to stand for particular times and places. The third turns to reinventions of Mother Courage and the potential future of the past. Written and practical work. In English.
