This working group brings together faculty and graduate students from SAS and Mason Gross School of the Arts to explore several nodes of shared interest. Multiple humanities disciplines have begun to explore performance studies methodologies as they consider the destabilizing potentiality of performance (what musicologist Carolyn Abbate calls the “drastic” quality of performance). The proposed working group will focus on the following topics:
- Practice-based research between performers and cultural analysts and historians.
- Cross-cultural exploration of performance and text globally
- Non-textual epistemologies (orature)
- The archive and its relationship to performance
- The supposed ephemerality of performance—following the work of Rebecca Schneider, what might “remain”?
By drawing together faculty from SAS and Mason Gross we will foster vibrant cross-disciplinary collaborations and promote interdisciplinary dialogue, creating opportunities for humanists to “think through performance” with their colleagues in the arts. We aim to hold at least two colloquium talks with invited speakers as well as workshops that bring performers and scholars together for practice-based research events where we use performance as a method of knowledge creation and analysis.
Organizers
Amanda Eubanks Winkler is Director of the Department of Music and a professor of musicology. Her research focuses on English music and theater. She was a long-term NEH fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library (2001–2002) and served as the Co-Investigator on Performing Restoration Shakespeare, a project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, UK (2017-2020). Eubanks Winkler has also engaged with performance studies and practice-based research, including workshops that staged excerpts of William Davenant’s Macbeth and Charles Gildon’s Measure for Measure (Folger Theatre, Washington, D.C.) and Thomas Middleton’s The Witch (Blackfriars Conference, Staunton, VA). As part of the Performing Restoration Shakespeare project, she served as music director for a workshop of the Restoration-era Tempest (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare’s Globe, London) and she co-led a workshop for scholars
and served as a consultant for a full professional production of Davenant’s Macbeth, staged at the Folger Theatre, Washington DC in 2018. She has also worked with professional early music groups, including ARTEK, La Risonanza, Ensemble Leviathan, NYS Baroque, and the Henry Purcell Society of Boston.
Eubanks Winkler is a General Editor for The Collected Works of John Eccles (A-R Editions) and has published two volumes of late seventeenth-century English theater music. Her two most recent books are Music, Dance, and Drama in Early Modern English Schools (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Diana McVeagh Book Prize competition by the North American British Music Studies Association, and Shakespeare in the Theatre: Sir William Davenant and the Duke’s Company, co-authored with Richard Schoch (Arden Shakespeare/Bloomsbury, 2021). Performing Restoration Shakespeare, an edited collection with
Schoch and Claude Fretz that draws together perspectives from academics and practitioners, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. She is currently writing a book that situates Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals from the ’70s and ’80s within a social and political context.
Nancy Yunhwa Rao, Board of Governors Professor of Music, Department of Music, Mason Gross School of the Arts
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nancy Yunhwa Rao has produced award-winning research on a range of topics, including gender and music, sketch studies, music modernism, cultural fusion in music, racial representations, and the music history of early Chinese Americans.
Her publications have provided innovative analytical approaches to cross-cultural music and enhanced public discussions about cultural encounter in music. Through her scholarship, as well as teaching, she has advanced knowledge and dialogue about the complexity of diversity issues in music scholarship.
Rao’s book, Chinatown Opera Theater in North America (Illinois University Press, 2017), tells the story of iconic theater companies and the networks and migrations that made Chinese opera a part of North American cultures. She unmasks a backstage world of performers, performance, and repertoire and sets readers in the spellbound audiences beyond the footlights. It received four book awards: from American Musicological Society, Society for American Music, Associations for Asian American Studies, and The Association for Recorded Sound Collections. In 2024, Rao was named Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society.
As a music theorist, Rao has explored intersections between China and the West, particularly global perspectives in contemporary Chinese music. She has published on the use of music gestures, vocal style, and percussion patterns of Beijing opera in contemporary music. Her study on Ruth Crawford won the award of best article in American music published in 2007 from the Society for American Music.
Rao has served as the Editor-in-Chief of American Music, and as a co-editor of the “Big Issues in Music” book series (University of Chicago Press).
Henry Turner, Vice President for Academic Initiatives, Henry Rutgers Professor of English, SAS Henry S. Turner is a specialist in Renaissance literature, with a focus on the theater of Jonson, Shakespeare, and their contemporaries and on intellectual history, especially the history of literary theory, rhetoric, and formalism; theatricality and performance; deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and semiotics; the history of science and technology; the history of capitalism; travel writing; law and literature; literature and science; literature and political thought; and literature and philosophy.
Professor Turner is currently co-writing a book with Jane Hwang Degenhardt (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) on ideas of cosmology and experience in Shakespeare, tentatively entitled Shakespearean Cosmologies: Aesthetics, Ethics, Experience. More details about past, current, and future work may be found at www.henrysturner.com.
Professor Turner is the author of three monographs on Renaissance literature and culture. The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516-1651 (University of Chicago Press, 2016) was awarded the 2017 Elizabeth Dietz Prize for the best book of the year in English Renaissance Studies and Honorable Mention for the 2017 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History in all fields and historical periods. His second monograph, Shakespeare’s Double Helix (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2008), juxtaposes a reading of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the history of genetics and 20th century debates over genetic engineering and theories of the posthuman. His first book, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580-1630 (Oxford, 2006), places the history of theater into the rich culture of early scientific thought in England, showing how poets and playwrights borrowed some of their most important ideas about form and representation from the fields of geometry, mathematics, and cartography. In 2007, The English Renaissance Stage was awarded Honorable Mention for the best book of the year in literature and science in all fields and periods by the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts.
Professor Turner has also edited a large-scale collection of essays on Early Modern Theatricality (Oxford, 2013), a collection on literature, economics, science, and urban history entitled The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2002), and a special double issue of Configurations: Journal of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts 17.1–2 (Winter 2009) on “Mathematics and the Imagination” (with Arielle Saiber). He has served on the Editorial Board of Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, Exemplaria, and The Hare, as Book Review editor for The Upstart Crow (2005-09) and Configurations: Journal of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (2005-6), and he currently serves on the Editorial Board of the book series “Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy” (Edinburgh University Press) and "Early Modern Cultural Studies" (Palgrave). In 2008, he chaired the Executive Committee for the MLA Division of Literature and Science (2004-09). His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and by a Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the American
Council of Learned Societies, taken in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
He is a former Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis (CCA), a leading institute for advanced interdisciplinary research in the humanities and social sciences at Rutgers, New Brunswick, where he also coordinates EMRG @ RU: The Early Modern Research Group at Rutgers, an interdisciplinary research program on the period 1400-1700.